WARNING: the final part of this essay contains spoilers for season four of Succession.

It’s tempting to say that if anybody has a right or reason to be pissed off with Donald Trump’s idiotic attempt to rename Lake Ontario, it’s me. I was born in Toronto; my parents lived at the time in an apartment in the neighbourhood known as the Beaches,1 as it boasted beautiful stretches of beach on the lake. My paternal grandparents’ house was immediately adjacent to the Scarborough Bluffs, from whose vantage you had a beautiful view of Lake Ontario. Long before I ever saw the ocean proper, I was familiar with the sight of a vast body of water stretching to the horizon. When I was thirteen, my parents bought the first of what would be, over the next thirty years, a succession of sailboats. They kept them at Bluffers Park Yacht Club at the base of the same bluffs from which I’d stared at the sparkling waters.2 I can’t count the number of miles I’ve put under the keels of various boats over the years, from day cruises, to sailing competitively, to spending time in the Thousand Islands, to hops across the lake to such American ports as Rochester and Youngstown.

But honestly, watching Trump edit yet another map with a sharpie; seeing the executive order signing ceremony in which he made the change “official”; and seeing the inevitable cascade of A.I. slop created by his cultists, which includes a video of Trump kicking over a Lake Ontario sign, replacing it with a “Lake America” sign, and then doing his signature herky-jerky dance … none of that pissed me off or made me angry, not really.

No, what I felt was a sort of exhaustion. The fatigue that comes from yet again thinking, “This is the president?” and wondering how a nation with such a proud and mythologized story of democracy born of revolution and Enlightenment philosophy could have elected this asshat. Twice. And now, almost two years into Trump 2.0, there’s still a critical mass of enablers propping him up even as his increasing senescence gives the lie to every delusion he projected from the start.

This most recent stunt isn’t worthy of the effort and sincerity of righteous anger. By now we’re familiar with the play: Trump does something inane and outrageous and deliberately offensive in order to distract from more substantive issues, which plays to that subsection of his base for whom trolling the earnest and owning the libs is the alpha and omega of Trump’s appeal. I’ve seen this motley group referred to as the “LOL nothing matters” caucus, and I cannot myself think of a better way to characterize them.

But I’ll come back to that momentarily.

I wasn’t planning on writing anything on this precisely because it was such a lame stunt, even by Trump’s standards, but then I’m a sucker for anything mixing geography and politics. One of the first essays I posted here on The Magical Humanist was a short piece on the “Gulf of America” idiocy. Earlier this year I was inspired by the not-entirely-implausible suggestion that Trump’s Greenland obsession proceeded from a misapprehension of Greenland’s actual size—that the Mercator Projection, long the standard global map in American classrooms and textbooks, was how Trump understood the relative size of the world’s land masses. The Mercator Projection, in flattening out the globe to two dimensions and being preoccupied mostly with fidelity of west-east latitudinal lines, is most distorted at the poles. The result is that Mercator’s Greenland looks comparable in size to Africa, when in reality being just seven percent as big.

To Trump’s mind, the theory suggests, that’s a huge piece of real estate.

We can never know whether or not his desire to own Greenland rests in an inflated sense of its acreage, but to my mind that’s beside the point. The metaphor is too apt: not so much the crude “BIGGER=BETTER” sensibility that animates Trump, but the metaphor of projection. All maps are “projections,” in which the reality of a given piece of territory is usefully distorted into a two-dimensional representation in order to elucidate certain geographical preoccupations—national boundaries and political entities, elevation and terrain, natural resources, climate patterns, roads and rail, etc. In this respect, all maps are to greater and lesser extents fictional; they “project” a given reality at the necessary expense of others.

In psychological terms, “projection” refers to similar distortions of reality. Paranoid delusions, delusions of grandeur, malignant narcissism, somatic delusions … but most specifically, according to the American Psychological Association’s clinical definition, projection refers to “the process by which one attributes one’s own individual positive or negative characteristics, affects, and impulses to another person or group.”

Sound familiar? We’ve become all too familiar during the past ten years with the adage that “every accusation is a confession.” QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene fulminated for years about a phantasmic cabal of liberal elite paedophiles only to founder on the rocks of an actual cabal of paedophiles that includes the Dear Leader and a critical mass of his inner circle. Trump et al have made it a point of faith that the 2020 election was rigged even as they overtly scheme to rig 2026 and 2028. They created congressional committees to investigate the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of government while Trump’s DOJ makes countless attempts to indict his political enemies, from James Comey to a random dude who touched the algae-saturated Reflecting Pool water. And for the past ten years we’ve been subjected to the mantra “FAKE NEWS!” while the nation’s greatest fabulist spews laughably transparent lies on a daily basis.

I could go on. And on. But frankly it’s exhausting and dispiriting, which I suppose is a large part of the point—as Hannah Arendt famously said, the point isn’t to convince you of the lie but fatally corrupt the ability to hold common truths.

However accurately rendered, maps aren’t reality, but projections of a given understanding of reality. Whatever else Trump’s random tinkering with placenames entails, it is on one level a recognition of the contingency of such naming; names are symbolic or descriptive, not absolute, and thus subject to change. But that’s a process that proceeds by custom and consensus, often with an eye to history. On one hand, it should surprise nobody that the megalomaniac who has a spent a lifetime putting his name on everything from steaks to casinos, and who has yet to meet a building or airport or landmark that wouldn’t in his mind be improved by his name, seeks to redraw maps. On another hand, this most recent foray into hydrographical rebranding serves to epitomize how profoundly unserious and capricious Trump really is. Lake America? Seriously? He can’t do better than that? To say he’s lost his fastball seems an understatement. I spent an amusing ten minutes putting together the map at the top of this post but couldn’t shake the feeling that in being mildly clever in my jokes I was giving him too much credit—it would have been far more on the nose to just have every province and territory branded “America” in a variety of misspellings.

Perhaps paradoxically, it’s the very unseriousness of the “Lake America” episode that makes it notable—not because we should expend energy being outraged, but because it’s indicative of the species of authoritarianism Trump represents. Which, ultimately, isn’t all that different from many others: dictators and would-be dictators tend toward the buffoonish and risible: Hitler’s histrionic style, so perfectly parodied by Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini’s chest-thumping braying; the weird eccentricities of Momar Quaddaffi; in general, the excesses of power arrogated to a single individual that translate into absurdities of character and behaviour, from febrile Roman emperors to mad kings to the television-mad dictators of the latter twentieth century—to which I suppose we must now add the authoritarians who swim in social media like cringe-inducing sharks, finding new acolytes among those for whom the digital medium is the perfect realization of a world in which nothing matters but the lulz. In the early days of Trump’s first presidential campaign, Adam Gopnik responded to people queasy about using “fascist” as a descriptor, making an observation that has stuck with me for ten years. Those who argue that fascism has a specific, singular meaning that Trump doesn’t fulfil, he says, misunderstand the term. “[T]o call him a fascist of some variety,” Gopnik argues, “is simply to use a historical label that fits.” Fascism is mutable and assumes a character reflective of whatever culture in which it takes root:

It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

When I said earlier in this essay that I wonder how the United States could twice elect such an obvious huckster, I was being at least a little bit disingenuous; to be sure, I frequently smack my head (figuratively) in incredulity that anybody could find Trump appealing, but I’ve been too much a student of American culture and history to not simultaneously grasp that Trump and Trumpism are as much a facet of American exceptionalism as any utopian conception of the shining city on a hill. Historically speaking, Trump is basically a hybrid of John C. Calhoun and P.T. Barnum making common cause with the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Trump’s presidency comprises the spirit of the age in a host of ways, not least being that it is shocking … but not surprising.

As I discussed at some length in a recent essay, I rewatched the series Succession, which is partly modelled on Rupert Murdoch and his own succession issues with his sons. The final season brings to the foreground what had previously been ambient—the fact that Logan Roy’s media empire, like Murdoch’s, is based on the cynical mining of outrage and fear and elevation of the politics of reaction. The flagship news station ATN is transparently based on Fox News, used by Logan as a cudgel to influence politicians and drive the Overton window in whatever direction is more profitable to him.

Season four is set against the backdrop of a presidential election. Late in season three, Logan decides to put ATN’s weight behind ultra-right-wing congressman Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk),3 who has a reputation for being fascism-curious and creepily obsessed with Hitler. In what is essentially the apotheosis of smoky backroom dealing (minus the smoke), Logan listens to his people as they make their cases for whom he should back in his role as GOP kingmaker.

That it’s his son Roman who embraces Mencken struck me on watching the show again as an “of course!” moment. Of course it’s the feckless, rudderless, decadent, profane Roman who gravitates to the candidate who’s essentially presented as a much smarter and more presentable version of Nick Fuentes. He likes the chaotic potential Mencken embodies, the attraction he’ll similarly have for a critical mass of ATN viewers and the kind of great television the ensuing drama will have. While he makes his case, Shiv argues against him with borderline incoherent outrage, pointing to all Mencken’s unpalatable and undemocratic qualities, the very qualities that attract Roman. Roman responds by mocking Shiv’s earnestness and the very idea that democracy or fair play mean anything, which only sends her into further sputtering incoherence while he smiles smugly.

It’s an argument that appeals to Logan, and it’s largely through ATN’s contrivances that Mencken becomes the surprisingly viable Republican candidate; ATN also calls the election for him despite many glaring questions remaining about lost ballots and other election-day disruptions. The show ends with the presidency being decided in court, so at least we don’t end with President Mencken, but precedent tells us not to be hopeful. Meanwhile, Roman had a brief moment as the golden boy and could imagine himself a kingmaker and power player; but then Logan dies and he finds himself wrong-footed and outplayed by people over whom his father had held mastery, not least of which is Mencken himself.

The key moment comes in the election-night episode, in which Roman steamrolls everybody in demanding that ATN call the election for Mencken. I’m simplifying the story here—which is a masterpiece of tension and newsroom chaos in which the final call is made by Shiv’s estranged husband Tom at least partly out of spite—but it ends with Mencken delivering a soberingly fascistic victory speech, which Roman is determined to shrug off. “We just made a good night of TV,” he says with affected boredom. “That’s all. Nothing happens.” To which a coldly furious Shiv retorts, “Things do happen, Rome.”

Things do happen. However absurd and trivial and unserious … things do happen. To repeat Charlie Sykes’s observation about Trump, if a clown has a flamethrower, it doesn’t make him any less of a clown, but nor does it make the flamethrower any less dangerous.

I squeaked this essay in under the wire to be an August post. When I told Catesby it was the last day of August, this is the look she gave me:

I feel you, cat. I feel you.

NOTES

I. Why study popular culture? When I teach it, this is the question I raise at the outset of the semester. I’ve already outlined in a recent essay how I address this question, so I won’t revisit that here. But how to study it is really the more interesting question, which we spend twelve weeks answering. In my previous post I mentioned in a footnote that one of my first lectures uses Bon Jovi’s song “Livin’ on a Prayer” as an example of how to unpack a given pop cultural artifact and tease out the various codes, discourses, histories, and meanings that the weight of culture impresses into it.

My friend Craig, who is an English professor in Pennsylvania and publishes with his spouse Dani the very excellent Substack American Id, gave me grief in a comment for “[b]urying Bon Jovi gold in a footnote.” He asked, “May I submit my vote for fuller treatment one day?”

This is that day! I’ve been neck-deep in course prep of late, so it seemed as good a time as any to really delve into it. What follows here, I should clarify, is a rather more substantive expansion on what, in class, usually runs between twenty to thirty minutes. But given that, as our outgoing Department head told me not long ago, I’ll likely be teaching this course every year until I retire … I’m thinking I’m just going to write my own textbook. Anything that prompts me to get writing on it done is all for the better.

Ready to rock out?

II. “Livin’ on a Prayer” was the third track on side A of Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi’s third studio album. The album was released in August 1986 and proved to be the band’s breakthrough moment, vaulting them to superstardom. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” along with “You Give Love a Bad Name,” reached number one on the Billboard Top 100.

The album shifted from the more metal-inflected sound of the band’s earlier work to a poppier, more mainstream rock, which placed it somewhere between the hair metal of such bands as Motley Crüe on one hand, and the more straightforward rock of someone like Bruce Springsteen on the other. Aesthetically, though the band sported the same sort of flamboyantly feathered haircuts as the glam rockers, they (mostly) eschewed the excesses of leather and fishnets and eyeliner, leaning more to denim and clothing that hinted at something of a bluer collar.

Though not exactly working-class heroes, Bon Jovi identified proudly with their native New Jersey—their third album was titled for their home state—and the state’s working-class sensibilities. “Livin’ on a Prayer” is perhaps the most overtly proletarian of their songs, evoking the travails of dockworker Tommy and his long-suffering partner Gina, a diner waitress. Their situation is laid out with admirably economical storytelling in the song’s first verse:

Tommy used to work on the docks, union’s been on strike
He’s down on his luck, it’s tough, so tough
Gina works the diner all day, working for her man
She brings home her pay, for love, mmm, for love …

The lyrics lay out a not-unfamiliar story from the rust belt of the 1980s, in which the decline of manufacturing and the union-busting politics of the Reagan administration had begun the long process of hollowing out the industrial working class. The financial sector was in the midst of the stratospheric ride with which the 1980s America is associated, as banking eclipsed industry as the principal vehicle of the U.S. economy. As an artifact of the 80s, “Livin’ on a Prayer” provides a useful contrast to the numerous films about excessive wealth and making fortunes in the finance sector: Brewster’s Millions (1985),1 for example, or The Secret of My Success (1987), and of course Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), among others.

That Tommy is a stevedore, a longshoreman who makes his living loading and unloading ships in one of the United States’ major ports, is symbolically significant, as it connotes a particular kind of labour with a long history stretching back to the ancient world. Dockworkers played an integral role in the Industrial Revolution, as they were lynchpins in the trade hubs that represented points of contact between ships and rail. Because of their importance to the movement of goods, longshoremen have long comprised one of the most powerful labour collectives, and thus the most effective unions. Which means that as a dockworker, Tommy’s not just a Union man, but a member of one of the oldest and most significant labour unions in American history. That his union is on strike is a brief but key reference to the song’s historical moment, when traditional blue collar labour was suffering the depredations of America’s ongoing deindustrialization.

If a useful counterpoint to “Livin’ on a Prayer” is 80s cinema about wealth, it’s likewise interesting to put it in conversation with material about dockworkers. Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge, first staged in 1955, is a classic piece of theatre depicting postwar blue-collar characters. Set in Brooklyn, it’s about an Italian American family whose patriarch Eddie is a longshoreman; he takes in two of his wife’s Sicilian cousins who have arrived illegally in the country to work. The play is in part about the solidarity of the second-generation Sicilian working-class community, who close ranks around the newcomers. Eddie is a classically tragic figure who, out of romantic jealousy, tips off immigration authorities about the cousins. In the context of the play, this treachery is presented as the ultimate betrayal, about the worst thing Eddie could do.

More recently, season two of The Wire took place in part on the docks of the Port of Baltimore and depicted the twilight of the once-mighty longshoremen union. Union president Frank Sobatka (Chris Bauer), desperate to revitalize the port and the livelihoods of dock workers, hires lobbyists with money he illicitly earns by facilitating the smuggling of drugs and (initially unbeknownst to him) human trafficking through his facility. Like Miller’s character Eddie, Frank is a tragic character, though the tragedy of The Wire is systemic rather than personal—Frank is essentially depicted as fighting the tide, the historical forces set in motion by both the right-wing politics of the 1980s and advances in shipping technology—namely, the modular containerization of shipping, which reduced dockworkers by 90% over the twentieth century—which leave Bon Jovi’s Tommy languishing without work

But Tommy is only one half of the song. Because all great power ballads need a love story, he is of course not alone. His girlfriend Gina (possibly his wife, the song is unclear on this point) is apparently the principal earner in their partnership, working long hours at a diner for presumably not a lot of money. They’re struggling financially, which we glean from the repeated line “It’s tough, so tough,” but more specifically from verse two’s allusion to Tommy pawning his guitar: “Tommy’s got his six string in hock, / Now he’s holding in when he used to make it talk.” Which raises the question of what Tommy’s up to when Gina’s slaving away at the diner. Is he walking the picket line? Has he looked for a job? Things are bad enough that “Gina dreams of running away,” though this itself raises further questions: run away to where? And does she mean to run away alone, or with Tommy?

Whatever individual sloughs of despond our heroes endure, the song is ultimately affirmational: they can endure their struggles because of the strength of their love, as established in the first half of the song’s refrain. Notably, it’s a sentiment first expressed by Gina:

She says, “We’ve gotta hold on to what we’ve got
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not
We’ve got each other and that’s a lot for love
We’ll give it a shot”

The song is thin on story, but heavy on the assertion that they can make it because they’ve got each other.

Whoa, we’re halfway there
Whoa oh, livin’ on a prayer
Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear
Whoa oh, livin’ on a prayer
Livin’ on a prayer

So, to recap: young, working-class lovers in a rust belt port city struggle because of systemic societal problems, which have hollowed out the employment opportunities and earning potential for blue collar workers. Things are bad enough that they have had to pawn their most prized possessions. But in the end what matters is their love for one another, and together they’ll make it despite the obstacles the world throws in their path.

“Livin’ on a Prayer” is unusual in its subject matter for what it is, namely a metal-adjacent hard rocking song with pop inflections released in the midst of a decade most commonly associated with decadence, wealth, and living a frenetic high life mainly preoccupied with partying and sex (and cocaine). Which isn’t to say there weren’t instances of class-conscious music and art, or politically minded popular culture;2 just that such instances provided a counterpoint to the prevailing, normative cultural narratives.

But … does “Livin’ on a Prayer” actually offer a critique of the Reagan/Thatcher era of anti-union, pro-laissez faire capitalism? Well, yes and no.

III. One of the points I stress in my introductory classes is that, in the course title “A Critical Introduction to popular Culture,” the word doing the heavy lifting is critical. We don’t mean the term in its most common and colloquial sense of being evaluative or judgmental (as in “Why are you being so critical?”); we’re not concerned with whether the course content—cinema, television, music, etc.—is objectively good or bad. Besides the fact that such value judgments tend to be subjective, the relative quality of a given movie or song is beside the point. Is “Livin’ on a Prayer” a good song? Sure, why not … I’ll reliably rock out to it, and it features prominently in my running playlists. It has proved to have an enduring popularity. It is certainly well made in the sense of the quality of its recording. But I don’t devote twenty to thirty minutes of lecture time to it as an exemplar of a singular work of musical art.

To be “critical” isn’t evaluative, or at any rare isn’t merely evaluative; rather, it’s an exercise in considering a text3 from a variety of perspectives, from its particularities to successively broader contexts and concerns. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye used the analogy of looking at a painting in a gallery or a museum. The first look sees the painting as a whole: its subject and composition, its size on the wall, as well as what kind of painting it is (realist? abstract? impressionistic?). Stepping in close, you see its technique: the brush strokes, the use of colour, the granular detail you don’t necessarily grasp at first glance. Stepping back, you consider the painting again, perhaps taking note of such framing details as, well, its frame (if it has one) and the card beside it with the name of the artist and the painting’s title. Stepping back further, you see the artwork in the broader context of the gallery show—possibly other works by the same artist, or thematically related works arranged by the curator. If you’re at a museum, you’re probably seeing it placed in historical context. Wandering around you see other paintings and other rooms, and your understanding is inflected by the kind of gallery (avant-garde? small and independent? chic, targeting wealthy buyers? publicly funded? on a university campus?). Whether a given painting is “good” or “bad” is at most a secondary consideration.

What we’re more concerned with is what a given text tells us about culture more generally—how it speaks to its specific historical moment, how it comments upon or illuminates what preceded it, and indeed what it has to say about the present moment in which we consider it. Does it exemplify prevailing values and prejudices? Or does it offer a critique or resistance to those normative elements? The answer to this either-or question, I stress to my students, is almost invariably both. Engaging in criticism is a constant exercise of what F. Scott Fitzgerald famously called “first-rate intelligence,” namely, “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Which is one of the reasons why I always begin the semester with the example of poor Tommy and Gina.

IV. So, to return to Bon Jovi: the song itself, music and lyrics, comprises one object of analysis—what Sigmund Freud called “manifest content,” i.e. what it is literally about … which is, as discussed above, the hard luck story of Tommy and Gina. As I left things before digressing into defining what I mean by “criticism,” the song appears, on its surface, to be a working-class cri de coeur set in an historical moment of anti-union animus and the active dismantling of New Deal liberalism.

Except … sure, it tells the story of working-class disenfranchisement and disillusion, but it stops short of identifying a source of the struggle. When I said earlier the song was “admirably economical” in its storytelling, I had my tongue partly in my cheek. “Vague” might be a better descriptor. “Tommy used to work on the docks,” Jon Bon Jovi sings, suggesting a certain finality, that he won’t be going back. Why? Well, “Union’s been on strike.” Why the union is on strike doesn’t enter the equation. Granted, “Tommy used to work on the docks, but the mechanization of labour and the decline of American manufacturing combined with the offshoring of jobs and neoliberalism’s antipathy to collective bargaining has dramatically reduced Tommy’s opportunities for well compensated work” doesn’t scan easily into the four-line verse of an arena rock anthem … but it’s hard not to see that, in the absence of more nuance, the real villain of the piece here is the union itself, whose reasons for striking are secondary to Tommy having to pawn his guitar.

Once upon a time (though now fairly long ago), I consistently misheard the lyrics in a way that made me more inclined to read the song as something of a protest anthem, or at least that it was, however obliquely, about Tommy and Gina’s resistance to the powers that be. I heard “Gina works the diner all day, working for the Man / To take home her pay …” The fact that Gina was working for The Man hinted at a general sense of systemic malaise. It was only when I started using this song as the basis for an introductory lecture, which entailed looking up the actual lyrics rather than relying on my fallible ears, that I realized the line is “working for her man.” Sometimes the most significant semantic shifts rely on the most innocuous parts of speech—the difference between “and” and “or” can be world-changing—and this instance is no different. In my erroneous hearing, Gina was foursquare with Tommy, an equal victim of circumstance. In the actual lyric, her story is subordinated to his, and her long hours working for shitty pay and meagre tips (all while presumably enduring the unwanted attentions of leering patrons) go to support him.

No wonder she dreams of running away. Reflecting back on when we first hear the refrain, as spoken by Gina, the fact that it’s her insisting “It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not” because “We’ve got each other and that’s a lot” begins to sound less affirmational and more like a desperate attempt to convince herself of something.

And let’s pause for a moment on the line “It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not,” which is repeated twice, once by Gina and once by Tommy. It doesn’t make a difference? I suppose it depends on what is meant by “make it.” Getting rich? Becoming a rock star? Escaping a penurious life of spotty employment for the comfort of financial stability? Because of the song’s general vagueness and anthemic sound, “making it” sounds existential, but that would then be contradictory, as it would totally matter if they didn’t make it. So one assumes the song’s referring to their circumstances.

In which case, not only is “Livin’ on a Prayer” not a critique of the depredations of working-class life, but in fact it goes a long way to affirming and reinscribing the general ethos that, in Margaret Thatcher’s notorious phrasing, there is simply no alternative to status quo capitalism. The song also hints at one of Thatcher’s other assertions, that “there’s no such thing as society.” Tommy and Gina comprise an insular dyad, focused so entirely on each other that they’re each other’s whole world, a closed loop with no apparent recourse to a sustaining community beyond themselves, in which they keep repeating to each other the promise that “we’ll make it, I swear.”

But how? Well, that brings us, finally, to the song’s title. Rather than seeking material improvement in their lives, the affirmational sentiment is one of faith. We’ll make it! How? Prayer, baby! Which, not for nothing, is an ironic and most likely inadvertent allusion to the resurgent religiosity that accompanied the rightward turn of the U.S. in the 1980s, with figures like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority attaining outsized political power and influence. One of the song’s most anthemic lines is “You live for the fight when that’s all that you’ve got,” which is inspiring in a sort of “Eye of the Tiger” manner, but, again, the song doesn’t offer a concrete sense of what to fight for; the innate value of struggle in itself, by contrast, has deeply religious undertones, with the implicit promise of a reward beyond the temporal world. It’s safe to say that the struggle framed in “Livin’ on a Prayer” is a spiritual struggle, which doesn’t bode well for Tommy or Gina finding steady well-paying jobs.

It’s also worth noting as a final point that none of this should be surprising, given that the song is explicitly framed in fairy-tale terms. Before launching into the first verse, as the throbbing baseline swells, Jon Bon Jovi murmurs by way of introduction “Once upon a time, not so long ago …”

V. One of my favourite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, which I’ve referenced in previous iterations of this popular culture class, features Calvin watching TV while slagging the programming as “garbage.” And yet he’s still watching it, because “there’s nothing to do.” Hobbes upbraids him, suggesting a host of more useful activities … and then ends up sitting and watching TV with him.

But it’s the little prefatory moment I love, in which Calvin, reading something in a book, says “It says here that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’ What do you suppose that means?” To which the TV responds: “It means Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet.”

In the dark turn my reading of “Livin’ on a Prayer” took—most definitely influenced by Marxist criticism—the “prayer” of the title and refrain doesn’t necessarily mean religious belief per se, but it functions as a generalized stand-in, a vague gesture toward hope that also entails a capitulation to circumstances. Marx’s notorious characterization of religion as an “opiate” isn’t necessarily an indictment of religious belief tout court, but the way in which the promise of bliss in the afterlife has the dual effect of (a) cajoling people to obey the temporal powers of mortal life, and (b) convincing them to tolerate whatever misery they’re made to endure as merely transitory, an uncomfortable blip on the timeline of eternity. But it also functions as a distraction, attributing injustice and suffering to an inscrutable divine plan.

Distractions from material inequities have always abounded—the shorthand “bread and circuses” was first coined by the Roman poet and satirist Juvenal in the first century CE to describe the sort of mindless entertainments employed by governments and other power structures to keep the citizenry preoccupied. The TV in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon acknowledges this, while also observing that, as opiates go, mass entertainment would prove to be fentanyl to religion’s codeine.

Which isn’t, I hasten to add, to indict the entirety of popular culture or guilt people for their love of pop music or action movies or reality TV. The culture industry might capitalize on the basic human need and desire for entertainment and the joy that derives from song and story, but that doesn’t in itself make its products bad or shameful. And as I hope this extended explication of “Livin’ on a Prayer” has helped illustrate, a given text can function both as critique and reinscription of normative discourses—the “two opposing ideas” Fitzgerald identifies as the sine qua non of first-rate intelligence.

Popular culture is by its very definition ubiquitous, and it appeals to a critical mass of people. The forces that go into making it always entail the push of artistic imagination and the pull of commerce in varying degrees; however simplistic or formulaic a given text might be, it always comes embedded in a broader cultural matrix informing it. Teasing out its often-contradictory formative elements is illuminating and instructive.

And when your subject is a song by Bon Jovi, it also entails rocking out at your desk as you listen to it repeatedly. So … also fun.

For all you living on a prayer, here’s an angel. Or possibly Catesby in a sunbeam. Tomato, tomahto.

NOTES

The third season of House of the Dragon just ended, and it left me with a burning1 question: why don’t I care more what happens in this show?

To be fair, I thought that this season stepped up its game somewhat—I particularly appreciated the difficulties Rhaenyra faced when she successfully (for now) claimed the throne, a vindication of the principle that with great power comes a critical mass of annoying details and an army of people looking to burden you with their problems.2 Heavy lies the head, etc. etc.

At various points through this season I mulled over whether I would write something of substance on it here, or whether it would end up being not worth really engaging with at length. The latter would have proven to be the case were it not for the fact that, serendipitously, my wife and I have also been watching Succession over the past several weeks.

Or more accurately: she’s watching it and I’m rewatching it. I binged the first two seasons during the pandemic. In advance of season three returning after a long hiatus, I tried to get my wife into it. She couldn’t make it past the first episode: her loathing for the principal characters was too much.

Which, to be fair, is understandable. Succession, for the unfamiliar, is a series about the über-wealthy Roy family: aging patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox), who has built a massive media empire, and his four children, Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Siobhan (Sarah Snook). Logan is very obviously modelled on Rupert Murdoch, and the show’s main action is loosely based on the putative power struggles between Murdoch’s sons for control of NewsCorp. But while the Murdoch parallels are the most overt, it’s also hard not to see glimmers of the Trump family, especially in the children; there are also moments that evoke the recent media buying sprees of Larry Ellison and his son David.

One way or another, the Roys are loathsome. Logan is a cruel and manipulative bully who constantly pits his children against each other, all of whom prove perfectly willing to be pitted. Having grown up within the cocoon of unthinkable wealth and privilege, they are predictably spoiled and think themselves superior in kind to all who weren’t to the manor born. They’re also all profoundly broken in their ways: a lifetime of emotional and mental and occasional physical abuse at Logan’s hands has them all simultaneously hating him and desperate for his approval.

ANYWAY. My wife’s first attempt at watching it foundered on her instinctive contempt for the Roy family,3 and so I ended up watching the third and fourth seasons on my own. I recently convinced her to try again, this time giving it three episodes before bailing. It only took two, as it turned out, so we’ve been watching an episode a night, which lately was punctuated on Mondays by House of the Dragon.

And then this past week I went to my gym—whose bank of treadmills stand before windows looking out on St. John’s Harbour—and was treated to the sight of the mega-yacht M5 (formerly Mirabella V), which, at over 250 feet is the world’s longest single-masted sailboat. At which point a bunch of jumbled thoughts about excessive wealth, power and privilege, and the current anti-democratic, pro-monarchy thinking within the broligarchy started to take something resembling shape.

It helped that, the same day I was treated to the sight of this monstrosity, we watched the finale of season two of Succession, which mostly takes place on the Roys’ own mega yacht. The serendipity: sometimes it burns.

But first, to return to my burning question: why am I generally so meh about House of the Dragon?

From one perspective, I should love this show: it’s Game of Thrones by other means, it looks amazing, and, like GoT, it is perfectly cast up and down the ranks of characters. The writing ranges from good to great, it’s well plotted, the characters are by turns as compelling or infuriating or dislikable or sympathetic (sometimes all at once) as the story demands. Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy)’s gradual heel turn since taking the crown is more nuanced and believable than Daenerys (Emilia Clarke)’s sudden embrace of fiery autocracy was in the final episodes of GoT. And I kind of love that Matt Smith brings the same energy he brought to playing the eleventh Doctor to Daemon Targaryen, just instead deploying that sociopathy for evil.

And the dragons are cool, especially when they’re behaving like petulant cats.

To be clear, I don’t dislike HotD. I’ve cheerfully watched it through its three seasons. I just don’t find myself getting invested in it—not in the story, nor the characters. Nor do I get excited in anticipation of new episodes as I did for GoT. I don’t mark the start of a new season on my mental calendar. One might suggest that the bad taste of GoT’s catastrophically bad finale has tainted all things Westeros going forward, and I certainly assumed that was part of the issue. But then I watched the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms earlier this year, and it was like watching GoT again for the first time.

To be candid, my framing question is disingenuous: of course I know why I don’t care more about HotD. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms clarified this for me: it features a lowborn hedge knight—Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey)—with no money or name, who naïvely believes that knights’ highest purpose is to protect and aid the weak, who blunders into the petty politics of noble houses. It is, like the other Westerosi properties, beautiful to look at, perfectly cast, and very well-written.4 But it is vastly more compelling as a story than HotD, because the stakes are at once lower and more grave—the fate of Ser Duncan, aka Dunk, aka “Dunk the Lunk,” matters not at all in the grand scheme of Westerosi politics, but matters enormously to Dunk himself and, by extension, to us the viewers.

By contrast, as I’ve said before, it’s difficult to care much which platinum-haired scion of incest sits the Iron Throne, especially considering we know what happens (more or less), and that in the not-too-distant future the Targaryen dynasty comes to a bloody end … only to be very briefly resurrected by Daenerys, whose own descent into paranoid authoritarianism confirms that, yeah, maybe the Targaryens were never a good idea to start with? A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place in the interregnum between the Targaryen civil war depicted in HotD and the post-Targaryen reign of Robert Baratheon that begins GoT; the Targaryens are weakened, dragonless, and struggling to project the power they previously had; the realm motors on mostly through feudal muscle memory, and it’s against this backdrop of disaffected nobility that Dunk makes his meagre, modest way.

But what does Succession have to do with HotD? I’m glad you asked! Aside from the fact that they’re both HBO shows, not much. Except that they’re both about questions of succession: who will succeed in seizing the Iron Throne, and who will step into the position of Waystar Royco CEO when Logan steps aside and/or dies? (They also feature seriously fucked up family dynamics, but this doesn’t really differentiate them from any other HBO drama featuring families.)

Succession establishes the significance of its title in its very first episode: on the occasion of Logan Roy’s 80^th birthday, he’s planning to retire as CEO and let his son Kendall assume the role. But he’s obviously not pleased with things, unwilling on one hand to surrender the reins of power, and uncertain that his recovering addict son—who talks entirely in the idioms of bro finance, throwing out a mess of buzzwords and saying nothing—has what it takes to run the company. Then Kendall shanks a deal he was supposed to close, Logan announces that he won’t be retiring, and in the episode’s final moments suffers a haemorrhagic stroke that leaves him in a coma for a couple of episodes, during which time Kendall attempts to take control.

And then we’re off to the races for four seasons in which Logan plays his children off each other, extending to each in turn the implied promise that they’ll be his heir.5 When all three finally find common cause at the end of season three (for reasons I won’t spoil), they find themselves yet again outmanoeuvred by their father and cut out entirely (“cut out” in the sense of being excluded from the Room Where It Happens, exiled from the power circle—they’re never not stupidly wealthy). When, in the final season, they’ve started their own company and keep attempting to challenge Logan, he finally sits down with them and says—as gently as Logan ever says anything—“I love you … but you are not serious people.”

And therein is the rub. Such wealthy, dynastic families are hardly unusual—as noted, the Roy clan might be based on the Murdochs, but really there are glimmers of every other such legacy fortune6 imperilled by feckless heirs, as well as the weird cultural assumption that being born to family wealth somehow makes you genetically predisposed to being its most effective administrator.

Such assumptions should probably not be surprising, as hereditary monarchy has a much longer pedigree than anything resembling democratic governance. Indeed, it might be said some sort of monarchy is the default setting of human civilization, despite being manifestly illogical. As the late great Christopher Hitchens wryly observed, being the eldest son of a dentist does not somehow confer upon you the capacity to be a dentist, and yet human society has, more often than not, made this calculation about whom to trust with varying degrees of absolute power.

One doesn’t have to be an historian or political scientist to see why this is the case: it’s comforting to have a capable person in charge, and power begets power. Which is to say that the capable person stepping into a leadership role would want to keep the power they accrued in the family (as it were). What emerges over millennia is a set of narratives and mythologies delineating a class of nobility, people divinely ordained or fated to rule, whose very birth conveys this right, and whose inherited wealth and privilege serve as proof of this elevated status.

The allure of this sort of thinking is evident in the present moment of illiberalism and democratic backsliding, when the structures of democracy have been so co-opted by the über-wealthy that those very billionaires can point to the democracy they were instrumental in denuding and say, “See? Doesn’t work!” and advance anti-democratic alternatives such as “Caesarism” and the sort of tech-inflected monarchy propounded by Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, aka Peter Thiel’s court philosopher. A significant aspect of the broligarchy’s neo-monarchical aspirations lies in the belief that, like being born to nobility in centuries past, the ability to accrue billions in personal wealth signifies that the billionaire is elementally different, different in kind rather than degree from the vast majority of their fellow humans.

Succession is, among other things, a sustained critique of this sort of thinking. Whatever his innumerable flaws, Logan Roy is depicted as a singularly talented person whose sociopathic killer instinct and unremitting need to win at all costs has facilitated his rise to power. He is able to do so in part because his accumulation of wealth and influence has advanced in lockstep with his ability to circumvent regulatory and governmental guardrails that might otherwise constrain him. We frequently see him on the phone with the president, applying pressure to the Department of Justice, and, in the final season, playing kingmaker in the U.S. election. What’s most infuriating about it all is how frequently he wins. In his mind, it sets him apart from others—to him, other people are just pieces on the board of the great game, his children included.

But when it comes to what happens to his empire when he dies or steps aside, he runs into a problem of his own making: he is his corporation. His children are by turns inept, arrogant, and not nearly as smart as they believe themselves. When Kendall is in the midst of his second coup attempt and is trying to convince Connor, Roman, and Shiv to join him, he makes an inadvertently apt historical analogy. When Shiv asks what a post-Logan reality looks like, Kendall replies, “We’re looking at 323 BC, basically … Alexander is dead. I take Asia, you take Egypt, Shiv takes Europe, Con, the, uh, rest of the world” (3.02 “Mass in Time of War”). Anybody who was paying even scant attention in classical history class knows that Alexander’s spectacular military success died with him: having built the world’s largest empire to date in a mere twelve years, it all disintegrated shortly after his sudden death at 32.7

Though the four Roy children have occasional flashes of self-awareness over the course of the series, they exist in a bubble of unthinkable wealth and privilege that confers on them the innate sense of their superiority in kind to anyone not so fortunate. Theirs is the kind of feckless royalty on display in the Windsor clan, such as exemplified in the Andrew formerly known as Prince, and depicted in ASOIAF and HotD by such sociopathic scions as Rhaenyra’s rivals Aegon and Aemond, or the hateful King Joffrey. In all cases, it manifests in part not just as disdain for their lessers, but their unthinking conviction that they aren’t even people. When Kendall is responsible for the death of a waiter at his sister’s wedding—driving them into a lake when he was drunk and high while seeking to score more drugs—Logan orchestrates the cover-up and assures him that it’s all OK because there was “no real person involved.” This phrase recurs as a shorthand for anybody lacking wealth and status when it is revealed that endemic sexual assault and harassment on the company’s cruise line resulted in a handful of suicides. “No real person involved” in that instance meant it was nobody the company had to worry about.

Logan articulates this sensibility in the first episode of season four. Decamping from his birthday party in disgust at the well-wishers and glad-handers, he goes to a bar with his personal security guard and philosophizes: “I mean … What are people? What are people? They’re economic units. I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies. But together, they form a market. What is a person? It has values and aims, but it operates in a market. Marriage market, job market, money market, a market for ideas, et cetera” (4.01 “The Munsters”).

On rewatching this episode, I immediately thought of showrunner Jesse Armstrong’s made-for-streaming film Mountainhead. The film is like Succession, but focuses on the tech broligarchy, featuring four frenemies who loosely map onto—or comprise composites of—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreeson, Peter Thiel, among others. Partly because it’s just a two-hour movie, but also because of the people it parodies, Mountainhead comes across as far blunter and more hamfisted than the nuance and subtlety of Succession. On first watching, I found the writing clunkier; on reflection, it occurred to me that in order to faithfully depict the vacuous and self-important nature of the broligarchy, there are limits to nuance and subtlety that can be employed.

A case in point is the character of Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the wealthiest of the four, who appears as a sort of Musk/Zuck hybrid. At one point he offers his version of Logan’s musing, asking the financier Randall (Steve Carell) “Do you … believe in other people?” While Logan’s ruminations hardly qualify as deep thought, they’re infinitely more complex than Venis’s 3am bong-rip riffing that echoes Elon Musk’s frequent characterization of anybody without wealth and status as NPCs, or “non-player characters,” the bots in video games who are either there to move the plot forward or be killed by the main player.

Succession is a sadly relevant show in the present moment because it offers a trenchant critique of the logic informing the current illiberal and monarchical pretensions of the billionaire class: not just the scions of wealth, but the billionaires themselves, whose own understanding of the world is so profoundly distorted by their wealth that they delude themselves into the conviction that they are different in kind and their unthinkable riches confer on them the infallibility of royalty.

In this, at least, HotD offers a useful parallel. GRRM is ambivalent about kings and queens. That may seem an odd assertion, given that they are the constant focus of ASOIAF, but the novels effect a sustained critique of the very idea of hereditary monarchy in a manner that departs rather dramatically from the standard conventions of post-Tolkien fantasy. Generally speaking, there are good kings and queens and there are bad kings and queens, but the latter tend to be bad because they’re bad people who’ve taken the throne illegitimately; so long as the right people sit the throne, monarchy as a default setting in conventional fantasy is presented as something approximating the natural order of things.

And not just in fantasy fiction proper: perhaps even guiltier of this understanding—and far more socially influential—is Disney and its Princess Industrial Complex. (But that’s a whole ’nother essay. Or if you like, you can read my thoughts on my previous blog.)

GRRM writes incessantly about hereditary monarchy and the titular game of thrones, but he goes a long way to denaturalizing king- and queenship as a natural governing order. The big tell on this front is that much of his fiction is preoccupied with the fraught question of succession: over the contestations of hereditary right and who has the best claim to the throne. The shit really hits the fan in A Game of Thrones when King Robert Baratheon dies before Eddard Stark can reveal to him that his children are bastards born of the incestuous relationship between his wife Cersei and her brother Jaime. His attempt to expose the bastardy and treason and hand the crown to Robert’s brother results in his execution. But the news—or at least the rumour—is out, and suddenly there are would-be kings all over Westeros, precipitating the “War of Five Kings” that occupies most of the extant books in the series. Meanwhile, across the narrow sea, the would-be queen Daenerys, the last (so we think) Targaryen, musters her own forces for her return.

Similarly, HotD is about the Targaryen civil war—the “Dance of the Dragons”—that unfolds some two hundred years before the events of GoT, when King Viserys I dies and his daughter Rhaenyra’s claim to the throne is contested by his son Aegon. Rhaenyra has been groomed to rule by her father, while Aegon is spoiled, cruel, and unserious. But she’s a woman, which is a sticking-point for many, who see in the much younger Aegon the patrilineal right of the eldest son.

As has been observed by many, GRRM’s fantasy has a lot more in common with Shakespeare’s history plays than with Tolkien. In their games of thrones, his various monarchs, would-be monarchs, and pretenders take the issue of heredity claims as a serious point of legal leverage, but in reality, it’s about the raw exercise of brute power where necessary, and subterfuge of varying degrees of cunning otherwise. The Targaryen dynasty lasted only three centuries, and had been established by Right of Dragon, with the Iron Throne literally forged by dragonfire. The kings and sometime queens of the Seven Kingdoms are rarely excellent at their job; more often they are ineffective and weak, or cruel, or indifferent to the responsibilities that come with the crown.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and the novellas on which it is based feature the unlikely duo of Dunk and Egg—Ser Duncan the Tall, poor hedge knight, and his bald squire Egg … whom we learn early on is actually one of the many Aegons Targaryen, and is the fourth son of the fourth son of the present king. Through twists and turns of Westerosi history that don’t need to be recounted here, he ends up becoming king, reigning as Aegon V, called “Aegon the Unlikely” because he was born so far from the line of succession. He was, GRRM’s histories tell us, a good king who died tragically in a fire before he could enact the reforms he had been planning.

The Dunk and Egg novellas in part comprise the story of how a precocious young man learns to become a good king because his circumstances allowed him to squire for an unremarkable hedge knight from whom he learned honesty, honour, and decency (we get the sense he already had these qualities, but growing up as the squire to a humble knight means he didn’t have them bred out of him by the privileges of court life and proximity to his family’s inbred psychoses). There is a faint whiff of Prince Hal’s sentimental education in Henry IV parts one and two—Hal’s carousing with Falstaff and other commoner friends, while seen by his father the king and others as a sign of dissolute character, is actually the inverse of Egg’s apprenticeship in decency. Hal’s association with prostitutes, thieves, criminals, and the grifting blowhard Falstaff is at once a self-imposed education in humanity as well as a bit of misdirection—when the time comes, he’ll step into his role as crown prince in a manner that surprises everybody who’d written him off as unserious. Shakespeare makes this much clear at the end of Hal’s first scene in 1 Henry IV, when the prince soliloquizes:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. (I.ii.173-181)

Hal goes on to be crowned Henry V, long considered one of England’s greatest kings, whose premature death when his son was still an infant left the realm unsettled and ripe for the civil strife between the houses of Lancaster and York, the conflict that became known as the Wars of the Roses8 and which ultimately ended the royal Plantagenet line. Henry V’s son grows up to be the notoriously weak king Henry VI who manages to lose all the French territory his father had won and is ultimately challenged by Richard, Duke of York. Though Richard is killed in the ensuing civil war, his son Edward ultimately triumphs to reign briefly as Edward IV. Upon his death he is succeeded by his youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who is crowed Richard III. Richard is deposed by Henry Richmond, aka Henry Tudor, who becomes Henry VII, succeeded in his turn by Henry VIII, who famously went through wives like some people breathe, and who fathered a daughter who would become Queen Elizabeth I.

Henry IV is generally considered a decent king; Henry V is famously considered a great king, mostly based on his military victories against France and because he didn’t live long enough to stain his accomplishments. Several steps down the line, Elizabeth I’s reign remains a high point in English historical memory. But in between we have the weak Henry VI, the nonentity Edward IV, the monstrous Richard III,9 and the massive and massively corrupt Henry VIII. Not a good balance of ruling personalities. Indeed, it was during the reign of Henry VIII that British jurisprudence developed the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies—which is essentially legalese designed to account for how a monarch can be (1) divinely anointed and ordained by God to rule, and (2) a philandering murderous adulterer who will cynically found his own church instead of going to therapy. Simply put: the king (or queen) exists simultaneously as God’s Chosen Ruler, and as a fallen sinner subject to all the temptations and corruptions of the flesh. If you ever wondered why British monarchs always refer to themselves as “we,” it’s because they’re acknowledging their plural existence in law.

Shakespeare’s histories are fascinating in how they exhibit the push of an emergent modernity and the pull of the lingering influence of religious medieval thought. This tendency is perhaps more obvious in the tragedies that deal with kingship and succession—Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, for example—all of which feature nature itself in revolt whenever the divine right of kings is abrogated or disrespected. The histories proper are somewhat more circumspect, leaving out the supernatural dimension of monarchical power, but take as one of their central themes the dual questions of who has the best claim to the throne versus who is best suited to be ruler. The issue of succession is an ever-present concern, as indeed it was for Shakespeare’s England. Elizabeth I cemented her quasi-mystical mythos by styling herself the Virgin Queen, which obviously precluded the possibility of birthing an heir. The anxiety over the potential for war and civil strife is an animating tension throughout the history plays, as is the equally fraught spectre of a bad king or queen taking the throne.

Shakespeare is modern enough to depict in his plays a more nuanced grasp of monarchical politics than a critical mass of post-Tolkien fantasy that leans into the trope of the once and future king, that is, the individual whom destiny has chosen to rule—the king in exile or the scion of a royal line who is possibly ignorant of their claim to the throne. (Think of Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, the Pevensie children in the Narnia chronicles, Garion in David Eddings’s Belgariad series, or of course King Arthur himself with his idiosyncratic talent for pulling swords from stones.) Shakespeare’s histories operate in part according to a logical corollary to the principle of the King’s Two Bodies. With all the competing claims to royal birthright, how do we identify God’s true anointed? With hindsight—events will reveal the truth of the matter. Was Henry Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the weak and venal Richard II legitimate or an act of rank treason and regicide? He spends an unsettled reign as Henry IV trying to put the question to rest, but it’s really Henry V’s victories in war with France and the capturing of large swathes of French territory that settle the issue. Similarly, the putative wickedness of Richard III is the proof of his illegitimacy and the virtue of the Tudor claim.

As I’ve written previously, the contradiction at the heart of ASOIAF is the series’ granular and contingent understanding of power on one hand, and on the other GRRM’s use of the typical overarching fantasy convention of a prophesied mythopoeic battle between Good and Evil, Light and Dark—or in this case, Fire and Ice—replete with the Chosen One who will arise as the champion of the good guys. Early on in ASOIAF we start to hear of the “Prince that was Promised,” a prophecy asserting that there will arise a hero, possibly a Targaryen, possibly not, who will lead the fight against the Ancient Enemy™.

As I wrote in my essay “George R.R. Martin vs. Destiny,” HotD reminds us of this prophecy when King Viserys (Paddy Consadine) shares it with young Rhaenyra (Millie Alcock), and shows her the inscription on a Valyrian steel dagger that reads “From my blood, come The Prince That Was Promised and his will be the Song of Ice and Fire”—the same dagger a would-be assassin uses to try and kill Bran Stark, which later ends up in the hands of Arya at a climactic moment. I found the citing of the prophecy an odd choice, narratively speaking; it’s a bit of fan service, to be sure, but really does little to add substance to the central story or raise the stakes. After all, we know what actually happens, and the ultimate fate of the dagger and the Targaryen dynasty has little to do with the events if HotD.

Or so I thought. But in the most recent season, as Rhaenyra struggles to assert her power and authority over her restive and at moments rebellious subjects, she dons the Joan of Arc Fall Line and—after taking a moment to kill the High Septon when he refuses to anoint her—announces to the crowd assembled outside that she is the Prince That Was Promised.

Which, to be fair, still has little to do with the events of ASOIAF and GoT. But it does deepen the thematic ambivalence to prophecy and fate at the heart of GRRM’s depiction of power as contingent and constantly shifting. While it’s unclear if Rhaenyra truly believes herself to be the Chosen One™ (though it’s a reasonable bet she does), we of course know she’s not … and that her assumption of the cloak of prophecy is a somewhat desperate attempt to legitimate her claim by way of an appeal to an extrinsic principle. Given that she’s flouted the gods with the murder of the High Septon, that leaves Prophecy. Suddenly the Joan of Arc aesthetic makes more sense.

OK, so that went on longer than planned, so I’m just gonna end it here. With a cat of course, who are our true royalty. Case in point: Gloucester, whose full name is Richard York, Duke of Gloucester. You will know him by his toe beans.

NOTES

1. Yup, Still Stuck in the Odyssey

As I noted in my most recent post, one of the most heartening things about the reception of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has been the thoughtful, good-faith discussion and argument that has followed. Love the movie or hate it, people seem inclined to engage in the best kind of criticism—which is to say, substantive and considered, with little in the way of performative posturing according to preexisting calcified attitudes.1 Given the storm of outrage preceding the film’s release, spearheaded by a certain erstwhile trillionaire whom I promised not to name in this essay, the actual response to the film has been startlingly reasonable.

Also heartening is the simple fact that the Odyssey, even (or despite) being directed by Christopher Nolan, could constitute a veritable cinematic event in our present moment. Further, that in our C.G.I.-saturated, A.I.-sloppified media environment, it would be executed almost exclusively with practical effects.

In some ways all this should be unsurprising: the response to the film, even among those who dislike it, reflects a cultural hunger for something other than the facile, puddle-shallow entertainment issuing from multiple streaming services, short form video, and the endless squeezing of franchises for yet more content.2 Nolan’s literally spectacular adaptation is a startling reminder that the Odyssey isn’t just a very long poem professors inflict on their undergraduate students, but is in fact a gripping and often rollicking story of adventure and adversity and homecoming. All that, even given that Nolan notably leaves out the sex, 3 of which there is an awful lot in the original.4

So, yes, Nolan’s Odyssey has been simmering in my mind since seeing it. There was a fair bit in my notes for my essay that didn’t make it into what I posted, which fell out along two lines of thought: one was a more thorough explication of Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and the way his adaptation of Sophocles’ play presents a particularly ruthless and cynical version of Odysseus; the other was a further discussion of James Joyce’s use of the Odyssey as the basis for Ulysses (1922), specifically the way in which Tom Stoppard makes use of Joyce as a character in his play Travesties (1974).

Immediately upon posting my Odyssey essay, I started thinking about writing a follow-up that would incorporate these two threads but could not think of how to unite them until I read an excellent Substack post by Elif Shafak of Unmapped Storylands, titled “The Strange Paradox Surrounding the Odyssey.” The paradox in question refers to the weirdly contradictory status the humanities and creative arts have in contemporary culture: “How is it possible that millions of people worldwide are so intrigued and energised by the Odyssey the movie while as a society and system we pay such meagre attention to the vital role played by the humanities?”

How indeed? It’s a question I ask quite frequently. As noted above, the Odyssey poses a particularly clarifying iteration of the question because its subject matter seems at first glance not to be the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, and certainly not the sort of thing you’d expect from a Christopher Nolan film.5 We don’t expect capital-G, capital-L Great Literature to be the stuff of mass entertainment, in spite of how often it has been in the past. One way to think of the Odyssey is as a dusty, three-thousand-year-old poem; another, more accurate way to think of it is as a story that has survived three millennia because it’s endlessly compelling and only improves on being revisited and retold.6

Still, the fact that the Odyssey being a hugely successful blockbuster film can feel like a category error is instructive. To understand that dissonance as illusory, we remind ourselves that this ancient epic poem exists on the same spectrum of all work of narrative creative imagination and satisfies the same basic human need for story and the intangible nourishment of what Northrop Frye called a collective utopian dreaming.

2. Mythology of the Everyday, or, A Thinly Veiled Defence of the Humanities

Which circles us back around to Elif Shafak’s question. How is it we can intuitively grasp the fact that, in Joan Didion’s infamous words, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”7 while also as a culture disparaging the humanities as an area of study? “Stories” is just shorthand for the vast realm of the imagination that defines humanity; the attendant schools that take human behaviour and invention and thought as their subject—history, philosophy, art and literature, political science, sociology, and so on—comprise a Venn diagram of overlapping circles at whose center is a multilayered intersectional point just labelled “people.”

Sir Terry Pratchett, my patron saint of magical humanism, frequently insisted that “imagination, not intelligence, made us human.” Perhaps, one might protest, that is a distinction without a difference. Or perhaps it’s a way of interrogating how we understand “intelligence”—suggesting that intelligence is predicated on imagination, or that intelligence as a higher function of mind is inert without the capacity for fabulation. Or, following on from this last thought, it’s imagination that makes human society possible, given that the critical mass of civilizational superstructure—law, nations, social contract, currency, etc.—are products of imaginative creation and exist as fictions we collectively believe into reality.

Hence when we talk about mythology, it’s a mistake to think about it solely in terms of ancient heroes and gods and monsters. The startling box office success of Nolan’s Odyssey exemplifies the definitional quality of mythology as reiterative, which is to say that narrative becomes myth by way of repetition and reinvention. As the French critical theorist Roland Barthes argues in his book Mythologies (1957), “myth is a type of speech [his italics].” It is not, in other words, an extant thing, but a process of language and meaning. “[W]hat must be firmly established,” he asserts, “is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message” (107). Though we have a category of narrative we term “mythology,” the content of those narratives is less significant than how they arrive there:

It can be seen that to purport to discriminate among mythical objects according to their substance would be entirely illusory: since myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones. Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. (107)

By the same token, he observes, “one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language” (108). More plainly, the stories of Odysseus and Penelope, Isis and Osiris, and indeed Adam and Eve are embedded in our cultural imagination by the same mechanisms that give us Westerns, police procedurals, narratives of nation and identity, and the kayfabe that governs professional wrestling (this last being one of the mythologies Barthes dissects).

All of which is by way of saying that understanding the world, society, culture, and people generally is impossible without a grasp of how stories work to create a given reality.8 We have a tendency to bracket off classical mythology alongside capital-L Literature as something apart and rarified, and when something like Nolan’s Odyssey or a new adaptation of Shakespeare or Jane Austen breaks containment, it can be by turns gratifying or disconcerting, though in reality it’s just a vindication of the fact that these stories exist on a spectrum that includes buddy cops or a reality TV star’s heel turn.

But I’ve been thinking a lot of Odyssey-adjacent thoughts this past fortnight, so let’s segue to a heel turn of another sort.

3. The Sorry Tale of Philoctetes on his Island

As I mentioned in my initial essay on Nolan’s Odyssey, my first encounter with Homer was reading the Iliad in high school, and as much as I enjoyed it, I was left feeling a bit cheated. Where was the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy? As I read the final chapter and got closer to the end, I started feeling anxious—how was Odysseus’s grand deception going to fit into these dwindling pages?

Of course, it didn’t. The Iliad ends with Achilles returning Hector’s body to Priam, with Troy non-horsed and the war still ongoing. I was baffled and disappointed. In hindsight, it was my first real experience of how Greek mythology exists in its totality: not as a comprehensive canon of definitive stories, but a vast and shambolic aggregation of myriad tellings and retellings full of inconsistencies, varying iterations, and outright contradictions,9 all emerging from longstanding oral traditions that survive as a huge constellation of texts—from such tentpoles as Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, Homer’s epics, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, down through the Latin adaptations and aggregations of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, among many, many others.

It has always been a bit daunting to realize that the saga of the Trojan War, from Paris’s abduction of Helen to the mustering of the Greeks all the way through the war to its bloody end and aftermath, is but a fraction of the totality of stories comprising Greek mythology10—and that even the epic poems concerning the war offer only a narrow window on the larger story.

Considering the huge cast of characters in both epics, but especially the Iliad, it’s unsurprising how many side-stories attend the core narrative: the death of Achilles, the slaying of Priam by Achilles’s son, Agamemnon’s prewar sacrifice of his own daughter and postwar murder at the hands of Clytemnestra, to name just a few.

Or, for that matter, the sad saga of Philoctetes, marooned on an island by Odysseus as the Greeks sailed for Troy, and, a little more than nine years later, convinced to return for the final days of the war. TL;DR: Philoctetes was a master archer, who possessed the bow of Heracles, a weapon that cannot miss and invariably kills its target. Most versions of the story have him bitten on the foot by a serpent as divine retribution for some transgression or another (there are a few to choose from). His wound mortifies; between its pestilent smell and his agonized howls of pain, he becomes unbearable to have around. It’s decided by the Greek commanders that he cannot make the rest of the voyage to Troy. Odysseus is tasked with stranding him on the island of Lemnos to fend for himself while the fleet sails on without him.

Not quite a decade later, however, the Greeks learn from an oracle that they cannot defeat Troy unless they possess the bow of Heracles. Oops! Odysseus returns to Lemnos to retrieve the bow from Philoctetes, whom all assume is dead. Spoiler: he’s not. So, Odysseus must either convince Philoctetes—who understandably has been nursing a terrible grudge against him all these years—to give him the bow or, as is more in keeping with Odysseus’s character, trick him into giving it up.

As with so much Greek myth, there are numerous iterations of the story that differ on the details of how Philoctetes received his wound, why he received it, whom Odysseus takes with him to Lemnos, how he gets the bow, and so on. In Sophocles’ play, Odysseus travels to Lemnos with Neoptolemus, aka Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles. He brings Achilles’s son as a means of gaining Philoctetes’s trust: Neoptolemus has only recently come to Troy in the aftermath of Achilles’s death, and so is not one of the Greeks responsible for marooning Philoctetes. The name of his illustrious father also carries weight. Odysseus tells Neoptolemus to lie to Philoctetes, to badmouth the Greek commanders (and Odysseus especially) in order to ingratiate himself and gain Philoctetes’ trust and so weasel the bow of Heracles away from him.

None of this dishonesty sits well with Neoptolemus. He would rather be forthright with Philoctetes, even if it means failing in their mission. “I’d rather fail and keep my self-respect,” he tells Odysseus, “Than win by cheating” (9) Odysseus says they can’t risk it. “Scruples,” he says sternly, “are self-indulgence at this stage” (10). The war and a potential Greek victory hang in the balance, he insists—with so much at stake, isn’t trickery, in a way, the honourable thing? Wouldn’t obeying one’s scruples at the expense of the greater good be a far worse sin than a bit of deception?

This is Odysseus at his most nakedly cunning, most ruthlessly amoral. We’re reminded at various points, a few times by Odysseus himself, that it was Odysseus who marooned Philoctetes and abandoned him to his lonely fate. Though Odysseus protests that he did it “Only because I was ordered to” (3), a common thread running through multiple versions of the story have him being the one who recommends the stranding. One way or another, in Sophocles’ retelling Odysseus doesn’t exactly express remorse for it, nor does he seem particularly concerned with Philoctetes’ sorry state these past nine years.

A lot of how we understand a character in a play depends on a given production and how the actor portrays them, but it’s hard not to understand Sophocles’ Odysseus as purely calculating and indifferent to Philoctetes’s suffering. He flatters Neoptolemus and agrees with all his ethical qualms while making a reasoned argument for why they can’t afford them … but what is communicated in the text, beneath his grifter’s smooth patter, is barely contained impatience for Neoptolemus’s inconvenient sense of honour.

My initial interest in citing Philoctetes in my first essay on the Odyssey was in offering an example of another iteration of Odysseus, one that emphasized certain qualities present in varying degrees in Homer’s version. Sophocles’ Odysseus leans into the character’s cynicism, much as Virgil’s perspective in the Aeneid is preoccupied with the brutal consequences of his guile, while Christopher Nolan reimagines him as earnest and moral and therefore haunted by the ethical quandaries of his stratagems.11 But then my notes went off in another direction as I found myself going down a Philoctetes rabbit hole, or, more precisely, revisiting thoughts from two years ago when I first encountered Sophocles’ play by way of Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy.

4. Hope and History

The Cure at Troy is Heaney’s “version” of Philoctetes; not a translation per se but an adaptation based on extant English versions from which Heaney builds out his own original embellishments, particularly in adding to the parts spoken by the Chorus at the beginning and the end. The most famous passage is one of Heaney’s additions, from a coda spoken by the Chorus after the play’s main action:

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. (77)

These lines have found themselves frequently quoted by politicians. This is perhaps unsurprising, considering that the play is about reconciliation and compromise and arriving at a solution to an intractable problem. The Cure at Troy was produced by the Field Day Theatre Company of Northern Ireland, which was founded by actor Stephen Rea and playwright Brian Friel, in part to perform plays that would address the Northern Irish Troubles and, ideally, move the political needle. Heaney’s “version of Sophocles” was initially staged in October 1990, at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland. A month later, the newly elected president of the Republic of Ireland quoted the above passage in her inaugural speech. A young constitutional lawyer, Mary Robinson’s election signified a sea change in Irish politics, “certainly one of the most clearly defined and defining moments in Irish history since partition” (Denard 1). Five years after that, the same passage was quoted by President Bill Clinton in Dublin, who had come to Ireland to bring the influence of American power and money to facilitate the Northern Irish peace process.

More recently, these lines have been frequently quoted by Joe Biden as his favourite piece of poetry. Lin-Manuel Miranda read the passage as part of Biden’s inaugural celebrations in January 2021. He was introduced by Tom Hanks, who said

President Biden has often turned to the words of Irish poets for solace and encouragement. In the pantheon of his favourite poets, Seamus Heaney stands above all others. The President has frequently quoted one poem of his for its particular relevance, inspiring him to declare that this is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.

As tempting as it is to glibly snark “Yeah, called that one too soon,” I confess to getting out over my own skis with this passage, not when Biden won the election, but not quite four years later when it looked for a hot moment like Kamala Harris had the momentum to defeat Trump. I recalled Biden’s citing of Heaney and went paging through my copy of his collected poems looking for it. It was only then that I realized The Cure at Troy wasn’t a poem but a play. I secured a copy and read it with the thought of writing something about “hope and history” in that moment, possibly something along the lines of Biden being a transitional president in spite of himself, with hope and history rhyming in the person of the first Black woman elected president.

In hindsight, it’s fortuitous I never organized my thoughts enough to write that.

I am glad, however, that I followed my impulse to grab the play and read it. The oft-quoted passage is oft-quoted for obvious reasons, but like much powerful poetry quoted out of context, reading it embedded in the full text reveals its much greater depth and complexity, and the “hope and history” passage lands more powerfully after everything that precedes it.

The Cure at Troy, as the title suggests, is a play about healing. It’s about breaking the cycle of injury and revenge and finding a way to reconciliation in spite of history’s still-open wounds. But beyond this central theme, it’s also about the role of poetry, both literally and figuratively, in exploring the liminal spaces between self and other, friend and foe, and thought and action.

Such indeed is the place of the chorus, whose role in Greek theatre is to sit between the audience and the actors, speaking to both and offering commentary on the play’s events while also at times advising the characters. Heaney makes this in-betweenness explicit: “For my part is the chorus, and the chorus / Is more or less a borderline between / The you and the me and the it of the it” (2). This liminality also places the chorus “Between / The gods’ and the human beings’ sense of things,” which is also, Heaney’s chorus notes, where poetry lives:

And that’s the borderline that poetry
Operates on too, always in between
What you would like to happen and what will—
Whether you like it or not.

The play’s action, such as it is, consists of a lot of back-and-forthing between Neoptolemus and Philoctetes and Odysseus; though Neoptolemus succeeds in winning Philoctetes’ trust, he cannot bring himself to be dishonest. Philoctetes actually hands him the bow and then falls asleep; though the chorus urges him to take advantage of this moment, Neoptolemus lingers. When he attempts to give the bow back, Odysseus intervenes, revealing that the fix was in the whole time. Distraught, Philoctetes curses them both and sends them away. But Neoptolemus returns and hands over the bow, even as Odysseus declares both of them traitors to the Greek cause and threatens consequences for not obeying his command. Seeing his moment to avenge himself, Philoctetes aims one of the deadly arrows at his old foe—only for Neoptolemus to intervene.

You get the idea. It loses everything in being so summarized, but hopefully the shape of the problem is clear: honour versus necessity versus the (justified) refusal to surrender an old grudge. Philoctetes, while wounded both literally and figuratively by events, is presented as unreasonable in his intractability. In its overture—original to Heaney’s version of the play—the chorus excoriates

People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones,
And their whole like spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations. (1-2)

There’s an irony in this description, given that it’s the son of Achilles who plays the reasonable and honourable diplomat, at once refusing to adopt the dishonest dissembling of Odysseus while also telling Philoctetes, effectively, to get over himself. “Stop just licking your wounds,” he says finally in exasperation, “Start seeing things” (74). The son here is a far cry from the father, whose own wound-licking and long-suffering and “self-regard like polished stones” is the Great Sulk that opens the Iliad.

The great act of imagination at the heart of The Cure at Troy—the role of poetry, or poetic thinking at any rate—is to see past the intractable realities of the moment. To be able to imagine what “far side of revenge” looks like. Heaney’s “version of Sophocles” is quite astonishing in how it takes a play over two thousand years old and makes it uncannily relevant to the political moment of early 1990s Northern Ireland, in which the far side of revenge must have appeared vanishingly distant. But then again, when Sophocles wrote Philoctetes in 409 BC, he was taking a story that was by that time centuries old to address issues painfully relevant to an Athens mired in the seemingly never-ending Peloponnesian War.

Which, as Heaney’s chorus obliquely points out, is the role of poetry in its most literal sense—poesis, making something from nothing, and in so doing conjuring the spectre of what seems impossible. Which, not for nothing, is a neat trick considering such creation is never ex nihilo, but almost invariably involves the reworking, reimagining, and retelling of extant stories. In what is quite possibly my favourite play, Travesties (1974), Tom Stoppard stages a comic argument between James Joyce and Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist anti-art movement.12 After Tzara has a bit of a tantrum and breaks all the crockery in reach of his walking stick, Joyce says, “You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts,” a line I quote here in case it calls to mind anybody I promised not to name in this essay. The more relevant part of his speech comes shortly after:

What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships—and above all, Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes—husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer … It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there’s a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it … (42)

I love every part of this speech except for that last line: I always wonder whether Stoppard is voicing Joyce as expressing a purely art-for-art’s-sake sensibility, or if it’s Stoppard himself speaking through Joyce. The idea, expressed most bluntly by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “all art is completely useless,” is one that seeks to mark out genuine, great art as transcendent and apart from the political or ideological or historical, from anything that taints or mars the purity of the art itself.

If you’re still reading, you’ll have gleaned that’s not a sensibility I share. No work of art leaves the world precisely as it finds it, for the simple reason that it changes the people who consume it. What Nolan’s Odyssey, and Heaney’s The Cure at Troy remind us is that what’s old can be new again and show themselves relevant to our given present moment.

As I was writing the last paragraphs of this essay, Gloucester decided I needed an editor. “Not enough cats,” he said. But then, that’s always his editorial advice.

REFERENCES

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1972 (1957).
Denard, Hugh. “Seamus Heaney, Colonialism, and the Cure: Sophoclean Re-Visions.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.3 (2000): 1-18.
Heaney, Seamus. The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1991.
Stoppard, Tom. Travesties. Grove, 1975.

NOTES

I. It’s been two weeks since going to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in the theatre, and it continues to do the thing any artist worth their salt wants their work to do—it’s stuck with me, lurking in my thoughts, leading me to seek out other people’s thoughts and criticisms, and sending me down a variety of Odyssey-shaped rabbit holes. All these sober second, third, and fourth thoughts haven’t necessarily improved on my initial positive reaction—the more I’ve sat with it, the more I see the film’s seams and its more simplistic and unsubtle qualities that the viewing experience (sometimes literally) drowned out. But I’ve also come to appreciate the film’s artistry more, even as I see more clearly where it whiffs.

This essay started out as a deeper dive into some spurs of thought that didn’t make the cut of my initial essay on Nolan’s Odyssey because they didn’t quite fit and it was already quite long. In my notes I was noodling around with The Cure at Troy (1991), Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes; I mentioned it in regard to its depiction of Odysseus as cynical and calculating, but wanted to look at the themes of reconciliation and healing that Heaney’s embroidery of the original play tease out. I was trying to connect it to a speech delivered by James Joyce in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties (1974) on the significance of the Odyssey as a work of art but couldn’t quite square the circle.

Anyway, squaring that circle was what I started with in this essay, but I found myself rehashing some of the culture war inanity that I’ve written about before and which Nolan’s film reveals as even more inane that it initially appeared. And it does so in a way that very usefully draws the inanity’s contradictions and wafer-thin grasp of history into sharp relief.

All of which proved rather discordant with my original topic, so I’ve hived it off into its own piece. I hadn’t wanted to continue in this vein … but here we are.1 Once more into the breach, dear friends, and then I’ll post a final essay on the Odyssey that hopefully won’t mention the name of Elon Musk or any of the other usual suspects.

II. Because for all the fulminating that presaged the release of the Odyssey, the film itself has largely (it seems) proved immune to the more typical sort of zero-sum fandom that has become sadly customary with blockbusters and franchises like Marvel and Star Wars. What’s been most surprising about the film, even more than the unlikely fact that Christopher Nolan of all directors can adapt a three-thousand-year-old epic poem of over twelve thousand lines and turn it into a veritable cinematic EVENT, is the critical reverberation of reactions—positive, negative, and ambivalent— engaged in actual discussion. Not talking (or yelling) past each other, not staking out preordained cultural turf, not treating one’s perspective with an all-or-nothing absolutism in which those disagreeing with you are irredeemable. Actual, thoughtful, earnest, useful conversation from numerous perspectives. The fulminators are still fulminating, of course, but their screeds and rants have largely been relegated to the fringes, eclipsed by the actual fact of the film as opposed to what they imagined it would be.

One of the things the Odyssey manages to do is demonstrate just how profoundly shallow the predictable sturm und drang over the casting of a Black woman and a trans man always was. The actual movie has taken the wind out of the usual suspects’ sails2 precisely because it reveals just how silly their fulminations really are, not least because Nolan’s retelling is the antithesis of whatever fever dreams of wokeness its early buzz inspired in their stunted imaginations. Indeed, a number of thoughtful conservative writers and critics have made this very point. Writing in the New York Times, David French states,

It’s a reminder of how stupid and petty much of the right has become that anyone would think this movie was “woke.” Yes, a Black actor—Lupita Nyong’o—plays Helen of Troy, and a trans actor—Elliot Page—plays Sinon, the Greek warrior who unwittingly tricks the Trojans into accepting the Trojan horse as a gift. But to label a movie woke simply because of the identity of the actors is to indulge in a caricatured version of the same identity politics that the right claims to loathe.

In reality, Nolan’s “Odyssey” is one of the most small-c conservative movies I’ve ever seen. I can easily imagine a natural law theorist watching the movie, nodding his head and saying, “Yes, there are universal moral laws, and this is exactly what happens when prideful men believe they know more than God.”

In hindsight, the irony of the overheated claims that Nolan’s Odyssey, sight unseen, was a desecration of Homer’s epic lies in the small-c conservatism French identifies. It serves to subvert the expectations that calcified among the extremely online right the moment the casting was announced. The film is, among other things, a lament for a civilization in “decline and fall” (to coin a phrase), a favourite subject of the fulminators. This sort of jeremiad regularly issues from Musk and his fellow travellers, who cloak themselves in the aegis of Western Civilization, habitually invoking the spectres of ancient Greece and Rome—extolling Greek culture and masculine Roman virtue while making dire comparisons between the latter’s fall into decadence and what they see as the depredations of the woke left, which they frame as being inveterately hostile to all that is good and noble about the West (as exemplified by Greece and Rome).

What I find at once infuriating and risible is the fragility displayed. The Musk cohort, who love to repeat the canard about strong men creating good times,3 don’t seem to have much faith in the strength of the civilization they’re ostensibly defending. Based on their frequent alarm over, well, anything in popular culture not white and male, they seem to believe that Western Civilization and its foundational texts are easily ruined.

As if even the most parodically woke rendition of the Odyssey (what that might look like is something I’ll leave to your imagination, dear Reader) could somehow mortally wound4 a foundational human story.5

Never mind that the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Paige in small but significant roles was not incidental or trivial—both contribute symbolically and substantively to Nolan’s overarching story—but neither was it indicative of a grand reimagining of Homer’s text to satisfy woke sensibilities. Never mind that both Nyong’o and Paige turn in compelling performances6 in their relatively brief times on screen. Even if their acting had been merely pedestrian, it wouldn’t have marred the overall film, and it certainly wouldn’t have made a dent in the long legacy of Homer’s epic nor the larger mythology from which it comes.

In the end, it must have been confusing to the Muskites that it had little effect on the Odyssey as a whole, which remained eminently recognizable and hewed as closely as a three-hour film can to literally epic source material. Doubly confusing must have been its spectacular success; trebly so that the decline of civilization depicted in the film was not brought about by foreign influence or invasion but precisely the sort of amoral and rapacious acquisitiveness that the billionaire class and the tech broligarchy—and the current strains of right-wing politics with which their find themselves sympatico—have made their key virtue. The rejection of the stranger and the abrogation of our responsibility to one another is not to their thinking a fault or sin or failing, but a core, guiding principle. Move fast and break things. Permissionless innovation. Growth at all costs. Rules and laws are for suckers. The vast majority of people are just NPCs.7

The world of Odysseus in Nolan’s film is experiencing a protracted collapse not because it has opened its gates to foreigners,8 but because—to quote a filmic adaptation of another epic hero—it has chosen to break all bonds of fellowship.

The crisis at the heart of Nolan’s Odyssey is the dissolution of the Law of Zeus, which the film frames as a conflation of the laws of hospitality and the Golden Rule—to welcome the stranger and treat others as you would be treated. Once a guest, that person cannot harm you nor by you be harmed. This widely held, unwritten rule, the film suggests, is what has held together the disparate Greek city-states in a world in which Troy is the stabilizing power. The ultimate victory of the Greek coalition kicks out the foundation of that stability, but by the time the Trojans haul the wooden horse through the gates, the Law of Zeus has already been fatally upended in a cascading series of transgressions that started with Paris absconding with Helen. To gain favourable winds for the fleet, Agammemnon sacrifices his own daughter, setting in motion the ultimate revenge of Clytemnestra. Her murder of her husband after the war ends is the symbolic final nail in the coffin of Zeus’s Law, as well as confirming the Greek triumph over Troy as a Pyrrhic victory.9 Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by what he understands as his war crime in tricking the Trojans the way he did, understanding that he has contributed to the breaking of the world as he’s known it—a fact confirmed when, in conversation incognito with Penelope, he reveals that the so-called “sea people” who’ve been raiding and pillaging all over the Greek mainland and archipelago are in fact the tattered remnant of the mighty army that once boasted a thousand ships.

The war itself is not the glorious conflict of heroic battles such as depicted in The Iliad. Our one glimpse of it is the brutal sack and burning of Troy,10 which culminates in the desecration of Athene’s temple and the murder of one of her priestesses, whose memory haunts Odysseus—either as Athene herself taking the likeness of the priestess, or as an expression of Odysseus’s conscience—it’s left ambiguous.

In its preoccupation with the aftermath of the war and its depredations on Greek society at large, the Odyssey makes clear that the war itself was and is the greatest transgression of the Law of Zeus. In the end, it wrought no benefit, and the ongoing debacle of the suitors in Ithaca serves to exemplify the toll it took on civil society, both in terms of the losses (the absent king) and the abuse of society’s unwritten laws and norms.

III. One last word before I (hopefully) put this subject to rest. In a different reality—a less-dark timeline, if you like—Elon Musk et al would watch Nolan’s Odyssey and realize that their freakout over its casting was overblown. “OK,” they might say, “we called that too soon.” Perhaps they’d allow that the casting was actually well done or at least admit it wasn’t the dagger to the heart of the Western Canon they’d feared. Perhaps they’d even find in Nolan’s retelling story elements consonant with some of their own preoccupations. Maybe they’d join the larger conversation about the film and, whether they liked it or disliked it, make thoughtful and considered criticisms.

Alas, that is not our reality or timeline. Though in truth I have difficulty imagining this alternate iteration of the usual suspects, given that—as I’ve been discussing—Nolan’s film provides a subtler indictment of their worldview and reveals how shallow the self-appointed champions of Western Civilization’s understanding of history and myth actually is. As Laurie Penny observes in her inimitable way, “the fragile failsons of the New Right can’t cope with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey,” which, she succinctly notes, contains “a warning about what happens when vainglorious men start stupid, self-serving wars and then run away from responsibility.” She continues:

Some people lack the capacity to understand the difference between fact, fiction and the nameless panic that chokes you at two in the morning after a hard day of cultural vandalism. It is particularly hard to unpick these things if you belong to a paranoid, reactionary cult that insists its feelings correspond exactly to measurable truth, which is what Musk and every other mewling MAGA man mean by “historically accurate.”

“Historically accurate,” incidentally, is how Elon Musk describes his planned A.I.-generated film of the Odyssey, which he promises will be released “Before this year ends.”

Leaving aside the fact that this cinetastic work of genius almost certainly falls in the category of Things That Will Never Happen, I can think of no better distillation of the Muskian/broligarchic understanding of art and literature and history than the promise to “make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” With, and I can’t emphasize this enough, generative A.I.

Apparently, Musk’s determination to respond in kind to what he sees as Nolan’s failure was inspired by an A.I.-generated short film depicting scenes from the Odyssey, which Musk saw and retweeted. The video is …. well, it’s very obviously an A.I.-generated version of what an Odyssey might look like, with all the uncanny valley aspects, affectless gloss, and visual WTF moments A.I. is notorious for. For instance, in the still below, a very shiny Odysseus stands at the helm at … the front of his ship? Or perhaps it’s the stern, based on the set of the sails, but then, based on the wake, they’re definitely sailing backward. Meanwhile, behind him his sailors sit at their oars in what one might charitably call a unique configuration.

The video is risible, but really is neither here nor there. Even if Musk were to fund an actual film production with a budget double that of Nolan’s—which would be pocket change to him—the idea that he could create a “historically accurate” version “true to the art of Homer” betrays his complete lack of anything resembling an even remedial grasp of art, literature, and history. I won’t rehash all the reasons why the very idea of an historically accurate Odyssey is all kinds of fatuous (you can read all that here). As for being “true” to the art of Homer … well, how precisely do you plan to do that in the twenty-first century in English and on film? We already have two works that are perfectly true to Homer. They’re titled the Iliad and Odyssey. Everything else, including their translations into multiple languages, is the realm of adaptation and transformation.

But then, that’s the point.

The idea that A.I. could produce even a satisfactory adaptation, never mind one that provides a transparent window into the very essence of Homeric poetry, is a uniquely idiotic and overweeningly arrogant assumption specific to the kind of person who looked at Twitter and saw not a social, political, and cultural morass, but an engineering problem. The kind of person who views humanity algorithmically, and who, to repeat Laurie Penny’s withering phrasing, is convinced their “feelings correspond exactly to measurable truth.”

Which, not for nothing, is precisely what great art and literature serves to refute.

In conclusion, I give you Catesby—the floof that launched a thousand scritches.

NOTES

I. Back in February I posted an essay about the outrage among the usual suspects that Christopher Nolan went “woke” and cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in the Odyssey. I won’t rehash my argument here—go read the essay!—but suffice to say I made the case that the retelling of myth and mythology does not entail or necessitate historical accuracy. In many cases, mythology entails the opposite of historical accuracy, and the various iterations of mythic narratives usually have as much to do with their contemporary moment as with the source material.

Anyway. Though I made the case for why nobody should get their knickers in a twist over Helen being played by a Black woman of Kenyan descent any more than, say, a blonde German woman, I was nevertheless not particularly enthused about the prospect of seeing Nolan’s adaptation. Why? Well, though I’ve consistently liked him in most of the roles I’ve seen him in, I wasn’t sold on Matt Damon as Odysseus. Damon’s sweet spot as an actor is playing sincere, earnest, even stolid roles—he can be funny or grave, a hapless goof or a kickass action star, but he’s usually grounded in a serious, good-faith sensibility. It’s telling that, for me at least, the one role he played that didn’t work for me was in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). What worked was the character’s obvious need to be like the glittery, wealthy friends he made; what didn’t work was his cynical duplicitousness.

So, when he was announced as Nolan’s choice for Odysseus, I thought … really? Homer’s master of guile, of deceit, of ruthless amoral cunning? Damon could Jason Bourne his way through the action scenes or science the shit out of a problem like the Trojan horse á là The Martian, but Homer’s Odysseus—as well as the Odysseus that shows up in other such stories as Sophocles’ play Philoctetes—is a man of merciless calculation, whose solution to given situations treats the inevitable collateral damage with a shrug. In a word, not Damon’s usual metier.

So, despite my full-throated defence of the principle that Nolan could cast whomever he damn well pleased, I didn’t really see how Matt Damon could be a satisfactory Odysseus (and, truthfully, also wasn’t sold on Nolan as the ideal director), and wasn’t overly keen to see it in theatre. But then the reviews started coming in, which were almost universally positive and whose common thread was SEE THIS IN THE THEATRE. At which point it started to feel like both a moral and professional obligation.

Reader: I loved it. If I had another reservation going in, it was that I remained unconvinced The Odyssey could ever be adapted to film in a manner that did justice to the poem. But Nolan pulled it off, and if he was characteristically restrained in his depiction of the story’s supernatural elements, he also didn’t go full-on Nolanesque in granular, gritty realism he has typically brought to even his greatest flights of fancy. He did go mostly Nolanesque, and his bloody-minded insistence on only using practical effects gives the film the sort of tactility sadly absent from a critical mass of Hollywood blockbusters … but he did allow for a wee bit of the mystic and mythic.

And Matt Damon? Well, his performance and the way Nolan crafted his Odysseus was a useful reminder to me of the arguments I was making back in February.

II. I first read the Iliad and Odyssey in my final year of high school, in a class called Classical Civilizations. I then promptly read the Odyssey again in my first year of university in an intro Classics course, in which I was also introduced to the Aeneid of Virgil. I realized on rereading the Odyssey that I actually preferred the Iliad—which is possibly very stereotypically male of me,1 though in my defence I was more intrigued by the large, complex cast of characters and the dance of politics and egos than by the many battle scenes (though those were fun, too). I was less captivated by the repetitive nature of the Odyssey’s monster-per-chapter encounters, and frankly a bit turned off by Odysseus’s arrogant swagger. I know I was supposed to be impressed by that very swagger, inspiration, as my professors claimed, for the putative questing spirit of Western Civilization, but my favourite character of all three epics was Hector … whom I tended to imagine as wearing a permanently long-suffering expression of exasperation as he stood, the lone sensible person, in the midst of madness. “These fucking people,” he’d sigh at Paris’s most recent bullshit and strap on his shield to go clean up the mess.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy reading the Odyssey. Quite the opposite. What’s always been most interesting to me are the many faces of Odysseus and the ways in which his character has proven elastic over his many appearances in a host of texts beyond the Odyssey. It’s indicative of this elasticity that, as I watched Nolan’s retelling and mentally ticked off the laundry-list of Odysseus’s encounters—Circe, Calypso, the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, and so on—I found myself defaulting not to the Odyssey itself but James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Which, I grant, must seem either unbearably pretentious or a tortured pneumonic strategy or both, but then I spent such a huge amount of time and mental energy working my way through Joyce’s magnum opus in grad school, deciphering and cataloguing its myriad allusions (Homeric and otherwise), that those correspondences are more deeply inscribed in my mind that the source text.

Joyce’s novel famously tells the story of a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, following around Leopold Bloom and Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus in an ambling retelling of the Odyssey, in which the grandeur of Homer’s epic of gods and monsters and heroes is mapped onto the quotidian activities and encounters of a complacent middle-aged Jewish advertising agent (Bloom) and angst-ridden student cum artist (Dedalus), who stand in for Odysseus (Ulysses) and Telemachus. The story is mostly Bloom’s as he goes from place to place, attending an acquaintance’s funeral (“Hades”), getting in an argument with an antagonist in a pub (“Cyclops”), listening to music while having dinner (“Sirens”), and so on. The action, such as it is, is about as far as one can get from the outsized, indeed epic, events of the Odyssey. But then, that’s the point: Joyce’s novel is many things, but arguably its key motivation is the consonance between the mythic and the banal, the persistence and presence of the stories we tell in the ways we understand ourselves.

III. Homer’s Odyssey begins, as epic poems do, with an invocation to the Muse, asking her2 to sing through the poet and tell the story—in this case, the story of Odysseus, who is described with the word polytropos (πολύτροπος), which translates, variously, to well-travelled, much-turned, wandering, or “turning many ways” in the sense of shifty, wily, or versatile.

How a given translator understands polytropos is usually indicative of the iteration of Odysseus we’re about to meet. The first English version was George Chapman’s 1616 translation,3 which begins “The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way / Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay”; the understanding of Odysseus’s chief characteristic as wisdom is echoed in Alexander Pope’s Popification of the epic (i.e. translated entirely into heroic couplets), which also lauds Odysseus’s wisdom: “The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d, / Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound.” Pope is perhaps a bit truer to the sense of polytropos by making Odysseus’s wisdom multivalent in its “various arts.” This complexity becomes more pronounced in modern translations. A.T. Murray (1919) famously calls him “that man of many devices,” while E.V. Rieu—whose 1946 prose translation I read in high school—refers to Odysseus as “that resourceful man.” Robert Fitzgerald (1965) renders it as “that man skilled in all ways of contending,” while Richard Lattimore (1965) says, more simply, “that man of many ways.” For Robert Fagles (1996), Odysseus is “the man of twists and turns.”

Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation simply begins “Tell me about a complicated man, / Muse …” Wilson’s translation—a “radically plainspoken” rendering, in the words of New Yorker critic Judith Thurman—has excited equal measures of praise and ire, not least because, as Annalisa Quinn writes for NPR, it “sweeps away much of the nostalgic detritus from the story” and “dispenses gracefully with unnecessary archaisms and flourishes,” that often leave readers of classics in translation “with the vague idea that much of the Greek literary canon took place in some idyllic part of pre-contemporary England.”

Wilson’s translation has also earned disapprobation in the current culture wars because it similarly sweeps away much of the hero-worship attendant on Odysseus, at times making his various foes—especially the Cyclops—more sympathetic. She also excises such euphemisms as “handmaidens” when referring to female slaves. Such editorial choices, along with her gender (she’s the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English), have led to her work being dismissed by the usual suspects as mere wokeness.

What strikes me now as I write her invocation alongside its predecessors isn’t the simpler language, but the fact that she employs an indefinite article. In every other instance cited above, Odysseus is “the man” or “that man.”4 In those understandings, Odysseus is singular, sui generis. In rendering him simply as “a complicated man,” Wilson at once suggests there is more to this character than a set of traits, while also making him a type of person rather than a sole exemplar. It’s a small but seismic distinction, which doesn’t take anything away from Odysseus—he is, after all, the titular character of an epic poem—but emphasizes precisely the elasticity I mentioned above, which makes him translatable not just into English but into an Irishman’s dumpy, genial ramblings around Dublin, as well as the countless other treatments the character has received.

IV. When I first read the Iliad and Odyssey, I was surprised that they left out the key part of the story of the Trojan War. Nowhere was the Trojan Horse! The Iliad ends with Hector’s body being restored to Priam, the war still unresolved; and though we hear allusions to the Fall of Troy in the Odyssey, we don’t have a thorough rendering of the story.

This sort of elision, I would learn as I read and studied more, was characteristic of both Greek myth and mythology more generally—the texts we have are those that survive, their authors informed by common knowledge of the stories, and so episodes of different sagas inform and appear in a variety of poems and plays by numerous authors, all of whom have their own takes on the different characters and stories. I would soon read the story of the Trojan Horse and the sack of the great city in the Aeneid, which reframes the perspective from the Trojan point of view as Aeneas recounts the tragedy to Dido, queen of Carthage … not a perspective, you would imagine, with much sympathy for the architect of Troy’s demise.

Nolan, perhaps unsurprisingly, gives us the very cinematic spectacle of the Trojan Horse and the Sack of Troy. Interestingly, he also incorporates—or at least hints at—a variation on Odysseus’s final journey, which wasn’t canon in Greek myth but was rather the invention of Dante Alighieri. One of Odysseus’s many side-quests in the Odyssey is a visit to Hades to ask advice of the blind seer Tiresias, who tells him that after he returns home and dispatches the suitors, he must make amends to Poseidon. From Emily Wilson’s translation:

you have to go away and take an oar
to people with no knowledge of the sea,
who do not salt their food. They never saw
a ship’s red prow, nor oars, the wings of boats.
I prophesy the signs of things to come.
When you meet somebody, a traveler,
who calls the thing you carry on your back
a winnowing fan, then fix that oar in earth
and make fine sacrifices to Poseidon … (11.123-131)

In some versions, this is where Odysseus settles; in others he returns to Ithaca and is accidentally killed by Telegonus, the son he fathered with Circe. In Dante’s Inferno, however, Dante, with the poet Virgil as his guide, encounters Odysseus in the Eighth Circle of Hell—the second-lowest, which houses fraudsters and liars. Odysseus, along with his fellow Trojan War veteran Diomedes, is condemned to be wreathed in chthonic fire that burns but does not consume. At Dante’s plea, Virgil respectfully asks that Odysseus recount how he died. Odysseus obliges, speaking from within the tongue of flame engulfing him of how he assembled a crew of men loyal to him and, leaving Ithaca to be ruled by his son, set off westward. Ultimately they passed through the Pillars of Hercules (i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar) and into the unmapped ocean beyond. There they caught a glimpse of a great mountain (Purgatory in Dante’s cosmos), before being caught in a violent storm that wrecked the ship and drowned its crew.

What’s notable in Dante isn’t just that he’s rewritten Odysseus’s end but has done so in a manner that makes a vice of the Greek virtue of ambition. Having returned home finally from Troy to his faithful wife and taken back his kingship of Ithaca, Odysseus isn’t satisfied. As opposed to Tiresias’s prophesied end in which he settles so far from the sea people don’t recognize an oar, Odysseus feels a restlessness that drives him back to the sea. Not even all that he’d longed for in his long absence can hold him long:

Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,

Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind. (26.94-99)5

Similarly, in death he’s condemned to Dante’s Christian Hell for the very character traits hailed by Homer in the epic poem’s invocation: his guile, ingenuity, and “many devices” are refigured as dishonesty and fraud,6 and his death the logical result of the sin of Pride.

The other notable treatment of Dante’s rewriting of Odysseus’s end is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his poem “Ulysses,” which unfolds as a speech by Odysseus as he makes ready to embark on that fateful last voyage. In Tennyson’s hands however, Odysseus is more recognizable as an exemplar of ambition, and the final journey is framed as a noble endeavour informed by his unquenchable spirit. “I cannot rest from travel” he declares. “I will drink / Life to the lees.”

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little …

“Ulysses” is one of those poems that, if encountered when one is young, has a transformational effect. It certainly did for me, especially when I first read the infamous closing lines:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It should surprise precisely nobody that these lines were quoted in Dead Poets Society (1989). This is the Odysseus my professors in undergrad were talking about when they held him up as source code for Western Civilization: heroic, audacious, brilliant, who suffers for his hubris but soldiers on nonetheless because reaching beyond his grasp is the only way of being he knows.

V. Suffice to say, Wilson’s Odysseus and the Odysseus of a critical mass of recent novelistic treatments is a somewhat more ambivalent figure. Margaret Atwood’s The Pelenopiad (2005) tells the story from Penelope’s perspective, reflecting on her past life from Hades. The twelve maids Odysseus ordered executed for treason—a detail elided from Nolan’s film—function as a sort of chorus for Atwood’s Penelope, and whose interpolations into her narrative complicate the heroic image of Odysseus, whom Penelope makes clear was a practised and inveterate liar whose main skill was in deceiving people.

Madeline Miller’s novel Circe (2018) makes use of a similar shift of narrative focus, in this case to that of the titular sailor-animorphing witch who in the Odyssey takes Odysseus as a lover and hosts him and his crew for a year on her island. Miller’s Odysseus is attractive and charming, but also notably closed off. Though he shares Circe’s bed for a year, she does not ever get a good sense of who he is; she senses however that his years of warfare have left him scarred and hurt, if not broken. This trauma surfaces when his son with Circe, Telegonus, goes to Ithaca to meet him; suffering a psychotic break when he believes himself threatened, Odysseus attacks his son, who accidentally kills him (thus adhering to one of the canon versions from the original mythology).

More recently, the theme of trauma and PTSD are centred in Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film The Return, featuring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. As the title suggests, the film focuses on the final episodes of The Odyssey, with Odysseus washing up on Ithaca’s shores and infiltrating his suitor-haunted home as a beggar. A Guardian review calls it “an elementally violent movie about PTSD, survivor guilt, abandonment, Freudian dysfunction and ruined masculinity.”

These are just a handful of representative examples of ways in which Odysseus and comparable mythic figures find themselves refigured in contemporary idioms, refocusing and reframing the source material through different lenses and preoccupations. As with all translation and adaptation, something new (hopefully) is added, something teased out or put in a new perspective; something will always also be lost. The very nature of mythology, as I noted in my February essay, is akin to a game of broken telephone. In his review of Nolan’s film in The New Yorker, Richard Brody critiques it for what it loses: it translates Homer’s epic into “a readily digestible modernity” that comes “at the expense of the richness of detail and the societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience.” In so doing, he concluded, Nolan “turns an epic poem prosaic.”

I find it interesting that Brody’s review does a precise job of summing up my misgivings about Nolan taking on the Odyssey, and also that I don’t necessarily disagree with his characterization—I just don’t end up in the same place with it. There’s poetry in the film’s spectacle, and indeed in the very scope of its ambition, itself Odyssean in its hubristic spirit. There is, to my mind, a fruitful and profound tension between the epic scope of the film and its principal character’s modest, serious, inward-looking nature—a variation of Odysseus that made Matt Damon a perfect fit for the role.

VI. Damon’s Odysseus, as reworked by Nolan, splits the difference between a recognizably traditional take on the character and the traumatized war survivor depicted by Miller and Pasolini. As per Wilson’s translation of polytropos, the Odysseus of Nolan’s film is complicated, but in the sense of depth of character as opposed to someone who plays different parts for different people and keeps his cards close to the vest. His ingenuity is not on constant display; for the most part, it’s his device of the Trojan Horse that stands in for his problem-solving, along with the guilt that wracks him over having used his subject Sinon (Elliot Paige) as the representative Greek left behind to tell the Trojans the horse is an offering made to Athene and convince them that the Greeks have sailed home.

In the Aeneid, Aeneas relates the story of Sinon’s deception with some bitterness, telling of how the Greek played his role to the hilt and convinced his erstwhile enemies that he has turned his cloak in betrayal of his people. Insofar as Sinon has had a half-life as a mythic character, it has been as an embodiment of deceit—indeed, Dante also encounters him in the same Eighth Circle of Hell as he meets Odysseus, though Sinon is a more pathetic and petulant figure. In Nolan’s Odyssey, however, Sinon does not knowingly deceive the Trojans, for Odysseus does not share the secret of the men hidden in the horse. When Odysseus later meets him as a shade in Hades, Sinon excoriates him for not having trusted him, leaving him to die at the Trojans’ hands without knowing his role in the Greeks’ ultimate victory.

Damon’s Odysseus, who suffers plainly from having knowingly deceived his devoted servant, is a far cry from the Odysseus of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes (which I read as adapted by Seamus Heaney as The Cure at Troy [1991]). In it, Odysseus takes with him Neoptolemus, son of the recently-dead Achilles, to retrieve the great bow of Hercules from Philoctetes—whom he’d stranded years before on the island of Lemnos because he’d taken a wound that made him impossible to bring along. The bow, an invincible weapon, is necessary to finally win the war; knowing that Philoctetes hates him, Odysseus brings Neoptolemus to deceive him into giving them the bow.

At every turn, Odysseus evinces no scruples—it’s Achilles’s son who ultimately finds a compromise. The Odysseus of Sophocles is a figure with no conscience to speak of, which does not differentiate him overmuch from Homer’s version. The goal of victory is one that necessitates any sacrifice, with no consideration for incidental harm.

Damon’s portrayal, by contrast, offers an Odysseus who feels as much as he thinks, and his thoughts most obviously bend to struggling with the quandaries that Fate hands him. After ten years, the war with Troy remains at an impasse. Packing up and sailing home would break the Grecian alliance and Greek society; victory, however, is equally ugly—and similarly entails the breaking of the cultural compacts that sustain society, embodied in the Law of Zeus, framed in the film as a conflation of the traditional laws of hospitality and the Golden Rule. It’s the Law of Zeus, we understand, that holds society together, but like all dicta handed down from Olympus it possesses intractable contradictions. The Law of Zeus allows the suitors to squat in Odysseus’s hall and carouse every night without fear of harm. But it’s also the same law that protects Telemachus from them simply being murdered, and Penelope from their forcing themselves on her.

Paris’s abduction of Helen precipitates the war because it entailed a breaking of the laws of hospitality, but it is made clear that Agammemnon (Benny Safdie) has long looked for an excuse to break Troy’s domination of the trade routes and make Greece ascendent. Odysseus engineers the Greek victory, but either outcome, victory or defeat, would break the world as it was. The long sequence depicting the Greeks sacking the city, raping and pillaging and burning, is not a scene of triumph but horror, which is reflected on Odysseus’s face as he bears witness to what he engineered.

In the end, after his return he embarks on his final journey—not out of hubris or restlessness, but of necessity, for in killing the better part of the suitors he broke Zeus’s Law. Exile is however a reward, for he debarks with Penelope in the realization of her impassioned plea made when Agammemnon first called his captains to war—sail into the west, she says, chasing the setting sun. That the film ends this way is a concession to the Hollywood ending in two ways: first, the happy resolution; second, it recapitulates the cliché of the Western ending, of the hero riding off into the sunset. The comparison is apt: that ending is romantic in two senses of the word, in that it’s sentimental and that it entails departing into the unknown. The gunslinger rides off into the sunset not because it’s picturesque, but because he saved civil society with the outlaw’s methods. Though he fought for good, his actions made him unfit to live in the society he saved. His only destination is to continue into the unknown.

To end, here is Bartleby, a cat of mythic proportions.

REFERENCES

Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. W.W. Norton, 2018.

NOTES

I. A late addition to my teaching roster in the fall term is one of my favourite courses: “Utopias and Dystopias in Literature” (ENGL 4817). It was a course originally designed by a senior colleague long before I joined the department; I coveted it from the moment I saw it among the course listings. When the senior colleague retired, with his blessing I became its proprietor. This autumn will mark the third time I’ve taught it.1

Given that it was a late addition,2 I haven’t had the time I usually take to mull over my options for readings and the general shape of the course. This post is thus more of an exercise in thinking out loud than normal. I’ve been going back and forth on how I want to structure this course—what to keep from previous iterations, what to add, what to revise and rethink. And as with all of my classes in this brave new world3 of Claude and ChatGPT, there is the new and pressing consideration of A.I. and its depredations of all the traditional modes of evaluation. It hurts me on a cellular level to think I might simply not be able to assign a research essay as the final assignment in a senior seminar … but here we are.

On the other hand, if I’m teaching a course on Utopias and Dystopias, the sudden pervasiveness of generative A.I. and all its utopian promise and dystopian potential make some of my curriculum planning obvious. It would feel vaguely like professional malpractice if I didn’t include a unit on how we’ve conceived of artificial intelligence in fiction and other media.

II. The big lift for a course called “Utopias and Dystopias” is filling out the utopian end of the equation. There’s really just vastly more dystopian literature to choose from. Which makes a certain amount of sense from a narrative perspective: conflict being the sine qua non of story, it’s easier to generate conflict out of the world going to shit. There is also the fact that it’s easier to imagine disaster than to imagine the laborious process of making things work, along with the simple base pleasure of knocking things down and blowing things up.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying here. There may be a lot more straight-up works of dystopian fiction than the kind of utopian works that imagine a perfect or ideal society, but the utopian impulse is arguably what fuels the creative imagination to begin with. Northrop Frye makes this point in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he characterizes literature as a sort of collective utopian dreaming.4 Fredric Jameson adapts Frye’s mythopoeic understanding to a Marxist framework, arguing that this “dreaming” as manifested in art isn’t merely an expression of collective unconscious but is an actively utopian gesture: “the aesthetic act is itself ideological,” he asserts in The Political Unconscious (1981), and has “the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (64).

More prosaically, Margaret Atwood has observed that writing is an act of both hope and faith. In this she echoes Flannery O’Connor—whose own work frequently runs to bleaker understandings of the human condition—who disparaged the idea “that the modern novelist has no hope” at some length: “The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels.” Writing a novel, she adds, “is a terrible experience,” and so “If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.” In the end, she concludes, “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them” (np).

All of which is by way of saying that crafting even the bleakest of dystopian visions into a work of art is a utopian act—an imaginative counterweight, as Annie Dillard suggests in Living by Fiction (1982), to the inevitability of entropic decay.

III. That said, this expansive understanding of utopianism doesn’t really help me to figure out which readings to include on my course this fall. The ever-present temptation with all course planning is to make no changes from a previous outing. That’s actually doubly tempting with this course, as the last time I taught it was one of my favourite teaching experiences ever. But that had to do with the students who comprised the class: in hindsight, I made some good choices with the readings and the course structure, but it was the students who made it sing. It would be soul-destroying to teach the same syllabus and have it fall flat.

(Also, I’m congenitally incapable of just doing the same thing exactly the same way; I’ve always had an innate compulsion to reinvent the wheel, if only sometimes for my own need for novelty.)5

The one theme that I’ll be carrying over from my previous forays emerges, in a way, from this understanding of art’s general utopianism. I’ve always been fascinated with the ways even some of the bleakest of dystopian visions comprise, if not a utopian impulse per se, then a definite sense of wish fulfilment. The simple fact that we love to imagine the end of the world or the collapse of civilization is as indicative of desire as it is fear or anxiety. Fredric Jameson notoriously noted that it was far easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but what that insight leaves out is the undeniable fact that it’s way more fun to imagine the end of the world, especially if that means that in the aftermath you get to live your best post-apocalyptic life as a crossbow-wielding zombie hunter.

But of course, dystopias aren’t necessarily apocalyptic, and if the idea of a Hobbesian wasteland excites some survivalist imaginations, numerous other dystopian visions are rooted in what initially appear to be blissful, peaceful societies. Brave New World (1932), We (1924), The Giver (1993), among others, feature nominally utopian scenarios whose darker undercurrents inevitably emerge. In the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the Commander (Joseph Fiennes) tells June (Elizabeth Moss) that building a perfect society is hard work. In response to her obvious protest—pointing to Gilead’s enslavement and rape of women for procreative purposes—he essentially shrugs. “Better never means better for everyone,” he says. “It always means worse for some.”

It’s this yin and yang of utopia and dystopia that has always fascinated me, and which I most want to explore whenever I teach the course. It’s notable that the very word “utopia” potentially contains its own negation: in Thomas More’s coinage, it can either derive from the Greek eu-topos, meaning “good place,” or οὔ-topos, meaning “no place” or “nowhere.” More’s Utopia (1516), a fictional travelogue of a visit to the titular island of Utopia, describes the ostensibly ideal civilization that the Utopians have created, but one is never certain if More is sincere in his celebration of this society or taking the piss. Some passages appear straightforwardly laudatory; in others there’s more than a little suggestion of satire. The name of More’s traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, from whom he hears of Utopia, translates from the Greek as “speaker of nonsense.” So your mileage may vary.

IV. Aside from my innate reluctance to simply recapitulate earlier versions of a course, there’s also the fact that this is a topic uniquely suited to be tailored to a given historical moment. In that respect, lot has changed in the three years since I last taught the course. Not least being the re-election of Donald Trump and all that has followed, as dystopian an eventuality as I could have imagined. Every day brings new pronouncements from the White House that would have made Orwell blush, not just from their brazen mendacity but in how they accuse Trump’s various and sundry enemies (the “Dumocrats,” the Fake News Media, radical leftists, the Deep State, illegal immigrants, globalists, among others) of the very crimes and corruption of which Trump and his cronies are transparently guilty. I write this in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s national address on the subject of these enemies’ attempts at election-rigging, even as he continues to pressure Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, which is so blatant in its own election-rigging that even the normally supine GOP Congress can’t muster enough votes for it.

Running parallel to Trump 2.0 while also being given excessive oxygen by his regime is the exponential growth of AI. The world as it’s currently being shaped and imagined by the broligarchy is the stuff of cautionary SF, in part because the tech billionaire class are enamoured of such SF while being determined to ignore the “cautionary” part of the equation. They’re going to build the Torment Nexus, dammit, on the promise that it will solve all our problems. If you want to familiarize yourself with contemporary utopian ideation, you don’t have to look farther than Silicon Valley. The current promises and prophecies surrounding AI are no different in essence than those once made regarding the earliest days of the internet, and again with social media, and are now just amplified with vastly grander utopian claims. AI will make us so productive that nobody will have to work again, and everything will be provided in a post-scarcity world. The inevitable arrival of the Singularity and the emergence of artificial superintelligence will resolve all the world’s intractable problems, from curing cancer to fixing the climate. We’ll merge our consciousness with the AI and achieve disembodied immortality and expand throughout the galaxy, possibly the universe.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that AI superintelligence will pull a Skynet and just terminate all of humanity, but that’s a 10% chance at best. 20%, tops!

All of which is by way of saying: I think it behoves me to include a unit on depictions of A.I. That realization recalled a thought I had back in January when watching Pluribus on AppleTV—somewhere around episode four or five, I thought “Next time I teach Utopias and Dystopias, I’m definitely including this show!” I wrote about Pluribus here, talking at some length about the way in which Vince Gilligan has crafted an extremely sharp and shrewd critique of generative A.I. in his fable about a world in which every person (with a handful of narrative crucial exceptions) has formed a collective consciousness. So I’ll definitely be including a few episodes of that.

I’ll likely also include Isaac Asimov’s classic I, Robot, and possibly one of Ian M. Banks’s Culture novels, which depict a post-scarcity future with a more or less benign A.I. civilization as part of the galactic community of nations.

Another possibility that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t reread it recently is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novel he wrote expressly as the basis for the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film. I picked it up on a whim when browsing the SF section; I recalled reading it as a teenager but didn’t remember much about it. I’d reread Childhood’s End (1953) in service of my ongoing series of essays on outer space and scale, and so was inclined to revisit more of Clarke’s work. Aside from the obvious element of HAL, the ship A.I. that malfunctions in a homicidal way, there’s also the exposition Clarke includes about the mysterious aliens who leave the monoliths scattered around the solar system to start with. In the three million years between leaving a monolith buried on the moon and when humans discover it and make the voyage to Jupiter (Saturn in the novel), the aliens evolve from their flesh-and-blood beings to uploading their minds to machines to becoming disembodied consciousnesses that rove freely between the stars.

It’s been some time since I’ve watched Kubrick’s film, but if I recall correctly this is all at best implicit; Clarke fills in the gaps. His exposition so perfectly anticipates the utopian predictions of A.I.’s most fervent advocates, one is reminded that their fever dream of the Singularity is really just a more hamfisted variation on a conception of disembodied, gnostic consciousness merging with the divine that has existed for millennia. Counterposing a representative Gnostic text with 2001 alongside some of the techbro manifestos of recent vintage might make for an interesting class discussion.

V. One text from my previous class I’ll definitely retain is Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel. Since I first read it, it has become one of my favourite novels to teach. It is a useful and perhaps necessary antidote to the sort of survivalist porn that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic narratives, especially the zombie variety, in which the means and methods of survival are foregrounded. Station Eleven shifts the focus from the how of survival to the why—what makes living on in a depopulated, despoiled world worthwhile? In Mandel’s novel, the vast majority of humanity is wiped out by a virulent influenza that mostly happens offstage, as it were, with little detail attached to its origins and pathology. (It is in this respect the antithesis of the world-killing flu that Stephen King takes several hundred gory pages to depict reaving its way through its victims in The Stand [1978].) The story focuses on a group of traveling actors and musicians, who trek between an archipelago of settlements in the Great Lakes region twenty years after the outbreak. Call themselves “The Traveling Symphony,” they perform Shakespeare plays and classical music for grateful audiences. The troupe’s motto, painted on the lead vehicle in their caravan, is “Survival is insufficient.” Meaning that, once you get past the problem of how to survive, the question becomes what do you live for? Station Eleven’s overarching thesis is that the soul needs nourishing as much as the body.

I title the unit in which we do Mandel’s novel with a line from Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb.” Describing the sculpture of a husband and wife on the tomb in a medieval crypt, the poem concludes “What will survive of us is love.” Also covered in that unit: the third episode of the first season of The Last of Us, “Long, Long Time.” Possibly one of my favourite episodes of television ever, it’s a somewhat startling departure from the bleak zombie apocalypse narrative of the series to tell the story of Bill (played by the always-welcome Nick Offerman), a gruff survivalist who builds a compound for himself; and Frank (the also always-amazing Murray Bartlett), a survivor who blunders into one of Bill’s zombie traps. The two forge an unlikely romantic bond, and the episode tells the story of their loving partnership over the years.

We watched it together as a class. When it was done, you could hear the sniffles. Little was said as my students filed out at the end; one of them, his eyes wet and red, paused in front of me and said hoarsely, “I wasn’t expecting that.”

VI. The way the course is looking in my mind right now, I’m thinking I’ll break it down into three units: A.I. and its discontents, “What will survive of us is love,” and a third that emerges from my work on and teaching of Weird Fiction. Alongside the technological dream/nightmare of A.I. is the comparable ambivalent understanding of post- and transhumanism, especially as depicted in the New Weird of authors like Jeff Vandermeer and Julia Armfield. I’m keen to teach Vandermeer’s Annihilation again, both because it’s a novel I love, but also because it reliably lands well with students. It’s also perfect in terms of its nominally dystopian vision: in “Area X,” a mysterious phenomenon of unknown origins alters organic life at the genetic level. An all-woman expedition (following the failure of at least ten previous expeditions) of different scientific specialities enters the region in yet another attempt to figure out what’s going on.

One of the recurring themes of the New Weird is a turn on H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. Lovecraft’s mythos centred on the figuration of the unthinkable and infinite, manifested in such “old gods” as Cthulhu. But because even glancing contact with such entities wrought madness unto death, they tended to mostly remain offstage. The more insidious horror was the tentacular infiltration of the individual subject, both mentally (in nightmares) and physically (the pollution of the self). Both invidious incursions tended to be expressions of white panic, the spectre of the violation of an individual’s sovereignty by a racialized Other.

(I’ve written at some length about this in a variety of essays here.)

The New Weird subversion of Lovecraft is to pose these transhumanist transformations as not necessarily dystopian—at worst merely inevitable, at best possibly emancipatory, not the destruction of the human but the next stage of evolution. At the moment I’m leaning towards including M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), which I’ve also written about here. It’s one of the first and most significant variations on zombie apocalypse that reimagine the infection as fungal—a form of the cordyceps spore that takes control of the central nervous system. It works as a good complement to Annihilation (as well as The Last of Us) because it arrives at a depiction of the “hungry plague” as not necessarily purely apocalyptic. It is possible that the sentient infected, in the words of protagonist Melanie, might comprise “the next people.” Which, on reflection, is a decent title for this third unit.

I’ll have to finalize my book orders soon, so what I’ve written here probably looks a lot like how the course will go. More in the near future!

For your requisite cat, here’s Gloucester in a mopey mood.

REFERENCES

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Second Edition. Minnesota UP, 1996.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 1983 (1981).
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. (ebook) Macmillan, 1969.

NOTES

WARNING: spoilers for all five seasons of The Bear to come. You have been warned.

I. We watched the final season of The Bear this past week, and while I’m genuinely sad there won’t be any more to watch in the future, I appreciate that they brought it to a timely end and didn’t drag it out well past its best before date. I was also quite pleased with how it ended (though Carmy’s new direction just goes to show you: men will abdicate from a career for which they’re enormously talented to take an architecture internship rather than go to therapy). This final season was a perfect cap to the series for a variety of reasons I’ll get into momentarily.

I loved The Bear all the way through, not in spite of its unevenness and imperfections, but because of them. This was a realization I had midway through the second season, specifically with episode six, “Fishes.” Season one had been a firestorm of mercurial tempers, rages, and interpersonal conflict, along with the hundreds of little catastrophes that can and usually do plague the day-to-day operation of restaurants. It was almost too much for me: as much as I enjoyed the show, I could feel my blood pressure rising over the span of a given episode. And then … season two comes in with an entirely different vibe. As the restaurant closes for renovation and reinvention, we follow all the characters on their various contemplative journeys: Tina and Ebraheim go to chef school and have dramatically different experiences; Sydney and Carmy work their way through prospective menus; Marcus goes to Copenhagen to study to be a pâtissier; Richie has a series of epiphanies learning front-of-house at a high-end restaurant. The pace is slower, more rewarding, uplifting. And then … BAM!1 A flashback episode that brings the painful disfunction of the Berzatto clan roaring back into the foreground. My blood pressure, which had finally settled back to acceptable levels after the end of season one, spiked back into the red.

II. It’s worth pausing over “Fishes,” as it embodies many of the elements that simultaneously made The Bear a great show and one of the most uneven series I’ve ever watched. For one thing: “Fishes” is an hour and ten minutes long. We were halfway through it when my wife said, “How long is this episode?” When we checked, she sent me out to get ice cream. It was a hot summer night, and she said, “If I’m going to get through this, I need something cold and sweet.”

When I started watching HBO’s flagship series back in the early aughts, one of the things that struck me was how they didn’t feel compelled to hew to a regular episode length. The Wire and The Sopranos had episodes that could be forty minutes or fifty or eighty; the episode length was determined by the story and not the other way around, and though a lot of streaming and prestige TV doesn’t take advantage of that freedom as much anymore, The Bear embraced it enthusiastically. Some episodes were so short as to be fleeting; some, like “Fishes,” or the latter episodes of this last season, expanded to fill the available space.

That unevenness in episode length was reflective of the show’s more general unevenness. Usually when I describe a season of television or an entire series as “uneven,” it’s not complimentary. Usually, it refers to a waxing and waning of quality episode to episode. To be certain, television as a medium is given to unevenness: most shows don’t come fully formed but adapt on the fly as the writers’ room figures out what and whom they’re working with, and indeed writers themselves come and go. This is particularly acute with traditional network television, as the need to produce 20+ episodes per season inevitably produces filler episodes as well as some genuine stinkers. Or, in the case of shows like Lost, an entire season wanders in the wilderness (so to speak) as the writers try to cash the checks the initial premise wrote.

The Bear’s unevenness seemed at times like experimentation. “Let’s try this, what the hell” often felt like the impetus, especially as the show progressed. While this tendency to go off in different narrative and thematic directions was often tonal—whiplash shifting from Richie and Carmy screaming past each other to “Oh god I love you man” sentiment, for example, or changing gears from frenetic kitchen chaos to quiet and contemplative episodes—it also often entailed questionable shifts in storytelling choices from subtle and nuanced to self-indulgent and gimmicky. Sometimes it was difficult to determine which was which. The small army of celebrity guest stars—John Cena! Olivia Colman! John Mulaney! Bob Odenkirk! Brie Larson!—was by turns funny, suitable, and overly self-conscious in a way that could take you out of the action.2 Ditto for the celebrity chefs playing themselves who paraded through.

But again, “Fishes” exemplifies how The Bear’s exuberance and over-the-topness can come together. Featuring John Mulaney, Sarah Paulson, Gillian Jacobs, Bob Odenkirk, and Jamie Lee Curtis in her first appearance as the Berzatto matriarch Donna, it’s a notably guest-star-heavy episode. Of those names I just listed, only Gillian Jacobs had appeared previously; everybody else inspired a moment of “Hey! It’s that person!” It almost became a bit much. Or perhaps it totally became a bit much for you. It could go either way, but then there’s little denying that the episode was an emotional kidney punch, especially coming as it did in the midst of season two’s self-affirming oasis of different characters’ sentimental educations.

III. One of the things I like about The Bear is that it took big swings. It fouled the ball off a lot, sure, but it also connected as often as not. I was always inclined to be sympathetic to the show because it’s about food and the way food can be—and should be—a social and communal connective tissue.

Jeremy Allen White’s performance as Carmy—and the way he was written—was brilliant in part because two things were obvious: (1) he grasped this basic dynamic about food on some level, but (2) he also couldn’t quite wrap his head around it because he was himself so afraid of connecting to other people. The structural irony of The Bear is that it’s a deliberately imperfect show whose main character is unhealthily obsessed with perfection. Of all the seasons, I found season three the most frustrating. Season one made me almost too stressed to watch it, but it was Carmy’s monomaniacal drive for flawless plates in season three that I found hardest to deal with, for reasons that have only become obvious to me in hindsight. At the time, I was just annoyed with him for being a dick. Now I’m heartbroken because he was missing the point of the entire project.

Richie, notably, got it. Of all the different characters’ arcs, his was the most dramatic.3 Though he never lost his basic lack of impulse control, he learned to channel it. What became clear is that his compulsive tendencies were always a product of his roiling and largely unarticulated (thought frequently shouted) emotions. First season, he was the character I most frequently wanted to punch. By the end, I was all in on his self-transformation. Always attuned to families of both the filial and adopted kinds, he understood the role of the restaurant more intuitively that Carmy ever did. If that wasn’t clear over the show’s previous seasons, he made it plain when asked what the best meal he’d ever had was. For him, he said, it was whatever was on the table at the Berzatto house on Sunday nights—the place where he felt most at home with his best friend and the family, fraught and tempestuous and dysfunctional as they were, who had adopted him as one of their own.

IV. As I noted above, I was always inclined to like The Bear because of my own love of food and cooking. It’s a topic I should possibly do more with here at The Magical Humanist, as cooking and eating communal meals has always been, for me, something both profoundly human and frequently magical. It was around this time last year that I wrote “On Cooking Slow,” so perhaps this is an annual thing.

I’m a good enough cook that I’ve often been paid the compliment (usually by my mother) that I could have been a chef. To which I think: hell no. I take the suggestion as the flattery it intends, but I’m also well enough aware of my own character and limitations to know I’d flame out in a professional kitchen after a single shift.4 Cooking for me is contemplative—it’s as close as I come to prayer or meditation. I’m also, largely, improvisational; though I have a roster of recipes that more or less turn out similarly each time I cook them, nothing I ever make is precisely the same twice. When people ask me for a recipe, I can never offer them exact measurements. I think in terms of knobs and dollops and splashes and dashes,5 and things take as long as they take to cook. I judge doneness by how something looks and smells.

None of that would fly in a professional kitchen, much less a high-end kitchen with Michelin star aspirations. The mantra in The Bear of “Every Second Counts” is of course a broader allegorical gesture toward living a life of meaning and intention, but in its most literal sense in Carmy and Syd’s kitchen, it’s a dictum that inspires equal measures of adrenalin and anxiety. That sort of precision is the antithesis of my personal cooking philosophy.

V. The starting premise of The Bear, and the drama of its first season, was precisely the tension between, well, precision and imperfection. What was this wunderkind of the restaurant scene doing bringing his fine-dining sensibilities to a raucous, sloppy, shambolic Chicago beef sandwich joint? That question gets asked repeatedly over the first season, and it’s one that takes five seasons to really answer. Because Carmy has been running from his family. Because at the heart of it, he hasn’t found satisfaction or meaning in becoming an exceptional chef. His guilt at the former and inability to admit (initially) to the latter bring him back when his older brother Mikey takes his own life and leaves to restaurant to him. A season of chaos ensues, and when he finds the money Mikey left for him he thinks to transform Chicagoland Original Beef into The Bear, he thinks he’s found a way to reconcile these fractured components of his life.

It doesn’t work, of course, not for him—it works, ironically enough, for the people around him6—because he can’t let go of his monomaniacal drive for perfection. The counterpoint to this drive, foregrounded in seasons three and four, is the persistence of the beef sandwich, now sold out of a side window. Ebraheim, having found himself ill-suited to culinary school, takes over this part of the business … which becomes, ironically, the one aspect of the restaurant to remain profitable (and which might be what redeems Uncle Jimmy’s investment—Ebraheim and his franchise idea is almost certainly a better place for Jimmy’s money than his mercurial nephew ever was). The sloppy, wet, shirt-staining sandwich is the exact antithesis of the artistic precision of Carmy’s dishes, and yet both aim for a common goal of feeding the soul as much as the taste buds and belly.

VI. With the exception of the last episode, the final season of The Bear comprised a single day, a single service in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. An apocalyptic thunderstorm? Check. Burst pipes and non-functioning sinks? Check. Random Fak falling through the ceiling? Check. Reservation app goes down, then returns showing an overbooked night? Check. No food delivery, meaning all the chefs have to ration what they have? Check. All of which is compounded by the usual interpersonal sturm und drang, exacerbated by the revelation that Carmy is quitting, and of course the restaurant’s financial Sword of Damocles.

Everything that could possibly happen to sabotage the kind of impossible perfection for which Carmy yearns comes to pass, forcing them to improvise—at a climactic moment substituting the planned meat entrée with leftovers from the staff’s dinner, brussels sprouts prepared by Tina and cola-braised short ribs courtesy of Sydney. All of which, unsurprisingly, wows the customers. It’s a classic case of making a silk purse of a sow’s ear, or, more appropriately, taking an unappetizing offcut and making it delicious.7

It’s not for nothing that a restaurant’s staff dinner is familiarly called “family meal.” In the case of the final episodes of The Bear, the expression is somewhat more than metaphorical.

Here’s Bartleby, himself one of the bigger food enthusiasts you’ll meet, napping after a big meal.

NOTES

I. As I started thinking and working in earnest to prepare for my course this autumn on Southern Gothic literature—and started jotting this essay, a companion piece to my ramble on my upcoming course on pop culture—it occurred to me that it was serendipitous to be doing so apropos of the ongoing semi sesquicentennial celebrations south of the border. I wrote some of these words on the Fourth of July.

I also had a moment of reflection in which I was, yet again, grateful to not be teaching at a university in the U.S. right now. Depending on where in the States I was and the degree of my institution’s capitulation to the current regime’s determination to suppress anything that “inappropriately disparages” America or is “unrelated to the beauty, abundance and grandeur of” American history,1 a course on Southern Gothic could end up being a non-starter … I could potentially be fired for teaching it.

Or teaching it the way I’d want to teach it, at any rate. Which is to say: as expressions of the ghosts haunting the American experiment and the scar tissue that attests to a history of barbarity.

This essay came together in a more fragmentary way than usual; what started as a straightforward description of thinking though and preparing for my class this fall took a dogleg into recalling my own relationship to the Gothic as a high schooler, and my discovery of the Southern Gothic in university. Then I had my realization of the serendipity of writing this around the Fourth of July, which took me down a rabbit hole of the current regime’s attempts to (literally) whitewash American history. So perhaps a road map is in order. First is my personal relationship to the Gothic, which when I was younger I understood in a narrow way, which did not include anything that would look out of place in a Nine Inch Nails video; this admission of my initial shallow grasp of the genre leads into a more nuanced introduction to its main themes and tropes. Next, I talk about slowly starting to appreciate Southern Gothic by way of reading William Faulkner. After that, how reading Faulkner’s heirs apparent deepened my historical understanding of the genre. Then I get into my meditations on the significance of the Southern Gothic to the present moment, and finally in the last bit I get around to talking about my actual course, along with the reading list upon which I settled after much agonizing.

Are you seated comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

II. There was a time, back in my callow teenage years, when the words “southern” and “gothic” would have seemed oxymoronic to me. The gothic sensibility, as far as my subcultural chauvinism2 was concerned, was a principally European space, always stuck in late autumn/early winter, fogbound, castle-haunted, populated with sullen people dressed entirely in black looking like Victorian versions of Robert Smith or Siouxie Sioux, who brooded meaningfully around mouldering graveyards. It was Dracula’s keep, Catherine’s ghost on the moors, misty London alleys in which danger stalked.

What it wasn’t was sultry and stultifyingly hot and humid. It wasn’t bayous and desiccated plantations, evangelical preachers tormented by secret lusts, cackling conjure-women in shacks filled with jars of cemetery dirt and dried bundles of weird herbs, or the haunted history of enslavement and its million agonies soaked into the soil like blood. That was a whole other thing, which in its manifestations in cinema and fiction had a definite lurid appeal … but that wasn’t gothic.

Which is my way of admitting two things: (1) I never read Interview with the Vampire in high school despite the number of people who told me I must read it, and (2) I understood the gothic only narrowly, as an aesthetic rather than an actual sensibility and mode of expression.

In the same way that the not-unrelated genre of noir is mutable and not solely limited to shadowy detective offices lit only by sun fretted through venetian blinds, the Gothic is enormously adaptable. It has its origins in the sort of thing my teenage self associated it with, but even that’s more of a late Victorian gloss on what was more properly a Romantic innovation.3 The stereotypical gothic aesthetic is incidental to its animating sensibility, which is the assertion of irrationality and unreason as an irreducible element of human condition. If Wordsworth and Keats et al were concerned with combatting the Enlightenment cult of Reason with celebrations of nature and the sublime, the gothic was the dark stepchild of the movement, exploring the flip side of the sublime in madness, monstrosity, and desire. Most famous of course is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).4 Perhaps the best pithy characterization of the gothic was the title a friend in grad school gave a course he was teaching: “Monstrous Desires” sums up the key tension at the heart of the Gothic, in which terror and revulsion are the flip side of lust and desire. It leans into the “fear and trembling” dimension of the sublime, often embodied in the dangerous sexual allure of the femme fatale or the Byronic hero—the vampire, for example, whose attraction is undeniable, but in the moment before they bite, you smell the reek of their bloody breath.

At the same time, the Gothic is both literally and figuratively haunted. The figure of the revenant or ghost recurs repeatedly. This is especially true for Southern Gothic, as it largely emerges from the wreckage of the Civil War. The ghosts of the Old South persist into the present, both in the form of the sins and crimes of enslavement, and desperate nostalgia for the illusory utopia of the antebellum years. Its most tragic characters, like Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, are often either haunted or delusional or both. Blanche mourns for the loss of her family’s former estate—which Williams names with ironic symbolism Belle Reve, or “Beautiful Dream”—which functions as a metonym for the fabled grandiosity of plantation life, whose wealth was built from the tortured labour of enslaved Africans.

In many ways, the Gothic is almost comically suited to Freudian analyses. It embodies the uncanny, the tension and consonance between Eros and Thanatos, and, above all, the return of the repressed. Its myriad tensions, contrasts and contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences, all speak to its in-betweenness; it lives in liminal and interstitial spaces.

In the past when I’ve taught William Faulkner or Toni Morrison or Flannery O’Connor and felt compelled to do a capsule lecture on Southern Gothic, my go-to illustration has been the opening credits of the HBO series True Blood. It’s a rare instance of a credit sequence being superior to its show:5 it crams so much Southern Gothic into a mere minute and a half, it makes me wonder if they worked from a checklist.

Really, this is Southern Gothic Cliff’s Notes. It has everything: fetid swamps, mouldering moss-grown old-growth forest, decaying plantation houses, states of ecstasy both sexual and spiritual, stock footage of racial unrest and unreconstructed bigots and segregationists (the small child in Klan robes is a chilling touch), images of both eroticism and putrescence, and a good ol’ boy with greasy hair and a trucker hat who manages to be both comical and menacing.

What’s particularly useful about this sequence is its emphasis on liminality: swamps and bayous are classic geographical signifiers in this respect, being both neither-nor and both-and as to whether they’re water or land. As landscapes, they’re indeterminate, with solid ground appearing and disappearing, and navigable water routes constantly shifting. Similarly, the credits employ the technique of montage to its best ability, juxtaposing images of civil rights protesters with their white antagonists, or dancing churchgoers with strippers and half-undressed people grinding on a sweaty dance floor.

In short, if you’re looking for a Southern Gothic primer, you could do worse than the True Blood opening. (The show itself works too, but frankly there are better Southern Gothic vampires you could go with.)6

III. My first forays into the Southern Gothic were my first encounters as an undergrad with the fiction of William Faulkner. The last text we did on the literary modernism course I took in first year was As I Lay Dying (1930), the morbid story of the impoverished Bundren family as they cart the body of their dead matriarch Addie in her coffin in a nine-day trek across the Depression-era Mississippi landscape to bury her with her family. Along the way, the corpse starts to putrefy, and (because Faulkner was rarely subtle in his symbolism) a cohort of vultures follows them. The story unfolds in a series of stream of consciousness chapters that are titled for the character whose mind we inhabit for that part of the story: Darl, one of Addie’s sons, a sensitive and thoughtful would-be philosopher, whose mental perorations spiral into increasing incomprehensibility as he becomes unhinged; his brother Cash, the carpenter and builder of Addy’s coffin, who can only think in the pure geometry of woodwork; his sister Dewey Dell, whose grief is eclipsed by her panic at her secret pregnancy; his other brother Jewel, for whom Darl seems to harbour more-than-filial feelings, and who nobody knows is the product of Addie’s affair with a pastor; Anse, husband to the dead Addie and a genuinely terrible person for whom this long journey is worthwhile because he can finally get some false teeth when they get to town; Vardaman, the youngest, who has hands-down the best chapter of the novel—a single sentence in which he says “My mother is a fish.” All these, plus a smattering of ancillary characters, from whom we get impressions of the Bundren clan from outside the family (spoiler: not good).

I was, I will admit, less interested in the cultural and historical dimensions of As I Lay Dying when I first read it than I was with Faulkner’s formal techniques. We’d spent the prior eight months in that course talking about the many stylistic and aesthetic innovations of modernism, from the impressionism of Joseph Conrad to the various poetic experiments of the WWI poets, imagists, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the relative merits of D.H. Lawrence’s erotically exaggerated realism versus the stream-of-consciousness of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Faulkner’s mosaic of different characters’ perspectives, each written in a style tailored to that character’s personality—Darl’s brilliant but borderline incoherent endless sentences, for example, as opposed to Cash’s itemized lists of how to build things—was, to my mind both then and now, virtuosic.

I proceeded to tear through a critical mass of Faulkner’s fiction over the next few years. Well … “tear through” is something of an exaggeration, as his writing could make for slow going, if not outright bafflement (I’m still not entirely certain what happened in Absalom! Absalom! [1936]). But his novels could also be very rewarding, and frequently startlingly beautiful—even when the characters, circumstances, and stories were genuinely dark and brutal. But then, that’s what brings us back to the subject of the gothic in its south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line iterations.

Again, as I said, my first interest in Faulkner was stylistic; it was only when I later started reading novels by Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, among many others, that I started to grasp not just the profound influence he’d had on American letters,7 but, reading backwards through those he’d influenced, his own fiction’s stew of race and violence and history, and ways in which his characters vividly depicted the deforming effects of an unreconciled past on the present. The Bundren family allegorizes the self-destructive dysfunctionality of the postbellum South, not least by the ways in which the individual characters’ chapters show them siloed and alone in their own minds, unable to truly communicate with each other or share. One chapter late in the novel is given over to Addie herself, apparently from beyond the grave, speaking as the novel’s representative ghost, sharing her resentments and grudges. The Sound and the Fury (1929) introduces us to the once-affluent Compson family whose disfunction is, if anything, more profound than the Bundrens’, and whose failing fortunes are directly downstream of the Civil War. This fraught family history is explored in more depth in the aforementioned impenetrable Absalom! Absalom!, in which the suicidal Quentin Compson attempts to unravel his familial connection to a monstrous plantation owner named Thomas Sutpen. There is no clarity ultimately to be had in that investigation, just a series of lurid stories whose truth or fiction can never be determined. The novel ends with Quentin protesting to Shreve, his Canadian roommate at Harvard, that he doesn’t hate the South. Though there is a certain quality of protesting too much in his assertion: “‘I dont hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately. I dont hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” (378).

I’ve read a lot of impenetrable books in my academic career, from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett’s novels and novellas including The Unnameable (1953) (aka The Unreadable), to assorted prose by Gertrude Stein, to say nothing of the various French theorists and German philosophers I’ve puzzled my way through. So when I say Absalom! Absalom! defeated me, believe me when I say I’m not easily defeated.8 The sheer difficulty of that novel is something akin to performance art, a monumental act of form following content, or perhaps content determining form.9 One gleans in that inextricability of tangled history and its tortured articulation one of the reasons Faulkner was so revered by such magical realists as Gabriel García Márquez—when reality itself defeats a realistic depiction, the language one uses needs to step up.

When I’ve taught Faulkner in my classes, I’ve usually stuck with As I Lay Dying, which strikes a useful balance between readability and its knottier prose. I wouldn’t inflict Absalom! Absalom! on undergrads, but I always share its opening sentence as an exemplar of Faulknerian style:

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. (7)

Sentences like this one, by the bye, are what makes some otherwise impenetrable books enjoyable. Reading Absalom! Absalom! for plot is profoundly difficult but reading it at the level of the sentence is often rewarding, and also brings home the virtuosity of the prose here. I suppose your mileage may vary: Faulkner famously feuded with Ernest Hemingway, with Hemingway given to saying things like “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” While I have to admit that’s a pretty good burn, I offer sentences like the one above as a counterpoint.10 Think of how it’s constructed, where it begins and where it goes, at once communicating the hot and stuffy claustrophobia of an airless room in a grand house, as well as the fraught family history embedded in the very air. It’s a fantastic example of Faulkner at his best, while also functioning as an embodiment of Southern Gothic.

IV. As I say above, I didn’t at first appreciate Faulkner’s historical consciousness. Those familiar with his work are probably thinking How can you miss that? To which I say: formalism can be a helluva drug. There is a long critical tradition of missing Faulkner’s nuanced and often lacerating critique of Southern and Confederate history, often quite deliberately. Ironically, it was his very experimentation in style and form that tended to facilitate apolitical readings of his work. In the postwar environment as colleges and universities grew by leaps and bounds with the assistance of the G.I. Bill, English departments became a humanities juggernaut; at the same time, the advent of the Cold War meant the discouragement of teaching overtly political or ideological texts and subjects.11 The prevailing ethos in literary study was to consider any need to read outside a given text—historically, culturally, biographically, or otherwise—a profound failing. You would think that Faulkner, with his queasy depictions of race and violence and incest allegorizing America’s many sins—to say nothing of self-loathing Southerners who definitely don’t hate the South—would be a nonstarter. But no: such elements tended to be elided in favour of celebrating his ambiguities, stylistic innovations, internal tensions, and elaborate uses of metaphor and symbolism.

It was, ironically, his embrace by the twentieth century’s most prominent African-American novelist that had the effect in part of foregrounding the innate historicism of his writing. Though American literature boasts many scions of the Faulknerian tradition, from the doyen of Southern Gothic herself, Flannery O’Connor, to Cormac McCarthy, his most prominent heir apparent was Toni Morrison. While authors like O’Connor often sought to distance themselves from Faulkner’s influence, Morrison first paid homage to his work as a professor at Howard University in the late 1950s and early 60s, defending him against a restive student body—including the likes of Stokely Carmichael—who vocally protested reading white Southerners whose views on race were murky at best.

Morrison’s fiction is itself both homage and corrective to Faulkner’s, adopting Faulknerian elements while forging her own entirely unique voice. While Faulkner’s work could have its historical dimension downplayed or ignored, Morrison made history inescapable, often by embodying history (literally) in her principal characters. Her signal work in this respect is Beloved, a novel whose present is set in the post-Civil War North. Beloved is a ghost story in which the main character Sethe, a former slave, is haunted by the grown, corporeal ghost of the infant daughter she murdered rather than allow her to be recaptured. Sethe is based on the historical Margaret Garner, who killed her two-year-old daughter when slavecatchers cornered her. She was put on trial, the argument of which ended up being over whether she should be tried for murder. It’s a testament to the perverse logic of enslavement that it was the defence demanding that the charge should be murder; the prosecution wanted her tried as property and returned to her enslaver. To charge her with murder would require her and her daughter to be considered as human under the law.

There is no escaping history in that story, as indeed there is no escaping history for Sethe. When the novel begins, the baby’s ghost is a poltergeist, breaking things and disrupting the home, an angry spirit “Full of a baby’s venom” (3). Such haunting is not unusual, as Sethe’s mother-in-law observes. When Sethe suggests they might move to escape the ghost, her mother-in law says,

What’d be the point? … Not a house in the country ain’t packed to the rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don’t talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don’t you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody’s house into evil. (6)

It is precisely this sort of haunting and others like it that are the animating spirit of the Southern Gothic: like in Absalom! Absalom!, the history itself takes spectral form, defeating any sense of an empirical or categorical understanding of the past.

V. Beloved is a novel that has been frequently challenged by MAGA’s anti-woke warriors who have mobilized to purge libraries and curricula of anything that might make white people feel guilty about their history12 or which otherwise besmirches their sense of America’s virtue. In both of Trump’s terms as well as the Biden interregnum, the MAGA intellectual wing13 has been hard at work attempting to impose its revisionist version of American history: one basically predicated on eliminating nuance and complexity, rehabilitating the Confederacy, downplaying or eliding entirely the history of slavery, and reinterpreting the founding principles of the U.S. Constitution in terms of blood and soil nationalism—and that’s just scraping the surface. As the overheated fulminations against Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have made clear, anything that reeks of systemic or structural understandings of issues like racism or inequality is anathema; America is awesome and great, and any problems it has or has had are the result of individuals’ failings (mostly liberals and commies and feminists).14

To reiterate an earlier observation, I’m glad I’m not teaching at an American university, as teaching Southern Gothic the way I’ll be teaching it this fall would likely run afoul of the pervasive attempts to elide or erase the less savoury elements of American history.

My current reading list, which may still undergo a bit of tweaking, comprises:

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Interestingly, it’s the two tentpoles—Faulkner and Morrison—whose novels I might change out. As I Lay Dying has always been one of my most reliable texts, and the one I’m most practiced at teaching. But my absolute favourite Faulkner novel is Light in August (1932), which I’ve only ever taught once. It’s less stylistically flashy, but in many ways has a more nuanced story. Similarly, while Beloved is perfect for a Southern Gothic course for all the reasons enumerated above, Song of Solomon (1977) is the Morrison I’ve taught the most and which includes a representative odyssey from North to South as the main character rediscovers his history

So we’ll see. As always, there are practical considerations; if I had world enough and time, I’d probably do either Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy or, even better, Suttree (1979)—my sentimental favourite of his novels.

Also, I’ve never taught To Kill a Mockingbird. I will confess, it’s actually not a favourite of mine, given that it’s sort of the mother of all white saviour stories. But it’s for the very reasons it’s not to my taste that I chose in include it; again, with world enough and time, I would be tempted to include Gone with the Wind (1936) as an extended exemplar of a Lost Cause narrative. Fortunately, given that I’ve only got twelve weeks of class to work with, that’s sort of a nonstarter.

(As you might imagine, the original wish list I drew up for this class ran to a lot of titles.)

VI. As I said at the start of this essay, it’s slightly serendipitous that I found myself writing this on and around the Fourth of July. I couldn’t help but think of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It stands as one of the greatest pieces of American oratory, yet it does precisely the opposite of what such national holiday orations tend to do: it questions the rationale for the celebration and reminds everybody that the nation’s most sacred founding document—the “promissory note” as Martin Luther King, Jr. called it—has never truly been ratified.

Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952), famously said of the Declaration of Independence, “In the beginning was the word and the contradiction of the word.” By which he meant the famous five words “all men are created equal,” penned by a man, Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned slaves—a fact that did not differentiate him from about one-third of the Declaration’s other signatories. In that contradiction was the fracture that would expand to a chasm in the Civil War and the wounds whose scars the present regime would cover over—but it is the repressed that will always return, as evidenced by Southern Gothic.

Well, that ended up going longer than planned. If you’ve stuck it out this long, you’ve earned a cat picture. Here is Gloucester, keeping cozy despite the fact that we’re finally getting some summer weather here in Newfoundland.

And despite the fact that he’s dressed entirely in black, he’s also never quite been able to pull off the goth attitude … though he does love The Cure. Guess which song?15

REFERENCES

Faulkner, William. Absalom! Absalom! Random House, 1936.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987.

NOTES

I. Many years ago—about twenty-two or -three, to be more precise—when I was in the later stages of my PhD and teaching on a per-course basis to pay the rent, I was fortunate enough to teach my department’s first-year course on popular culture. I taught it twice, in 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. It was the largest class I’ve ever taught, with 150 students the first time and 250 the second. I had TAs, even!

Fast-forward to fall of 2016, when I taught another variation on it. “A Critical Introduction to Popular Culture” is a second year required course for students majoring in Communications and Media Studies (CMST) here at Memorial University. I taught it again the following autumn, then didn’t teach it again until fall of 2023, and I’ve taught it every year since, and will almost certainly be teaching it every year until I retire.1

This year? I’m teaching it twice, once in the fall term, and again in the winter.

I start every new class, after I’ve distributed and talked through the syllabus, with two items. One, I do a close reading of “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi as an example of how a pop cultural artifact that seems, manifestly, to be about one thing can also express its effective opposite; how it can appear to be a protest against the inequities of its historical moment while simultaneously reinscribing its prevailing, normative zeitgeist.2 But before I get to that, I share an anecdote from the first time I taught pop culture back in my grad student days at the University of Western Ontario.3 A close friend of mine, a doctoral student in philosophy, invited me out for an evening of bar-hopping with a handful of his fellow grad students. We pre-gamed at his apartment, which meant making small talk with a bunch of aspiring philosophers. That is always a bit of a mixed bag, depending on the kind of philosopher you end up talking to. I chatted at one point with an affable enough fellow, and I asked him what sort of teaching he was doing. Oh, just your basic Philosophy 101, he said. And me? Well, I started to reply and paused. “I’m teaching a course on popular culture.”

Ah, he said, and gave me a quizzical look. “But … is that something you really need to teach them?”

By which I took him to mean: our students are already immersed in popular culture, probably more than us. In what way is such a class at all reflective of the sort of intellectual rigor a university education ostensibly imparts? And lurking beneath that question is the assumption that any such class is really just a bird course that does not tax students’ minds and provides university departments with easy, large-enrolment cash cows.

Well, I won’t deny that such courses as pop culture certainly do a good job of getting bums in seats. The attraction of watching movies and TV and getting a university credit for it sounds like a lark. Certainly, watching The Simpsons and The Matrix (both of which I did in those courses) is rather less taxing than reading, say, Aristotle or John Hume in my friend’s philosophy course. And as he observed, it’s not as though I’d be introducing Bart and Marge and Neo to my students.

But that’s not the point of the class, I said.4 In Philosophy 101 or something comparable, yes, you’re likely introducing students to something new. Maybe you’ve heard of this Aristotle guy, you might say, but you probably haven’t read him or know much about him. So let me tell you …

If teaching many subjects is a process of familiarization, the teaching of popular culture is very much one of defamiliarization. It is structural and theoretical more than it is about content—it actually matters little what examples I use. The finer plot points of a given episode of I Love Lucy or Friends matter not at all except in how they exhibit a structural consonance. In the former it was a minor scandal to have Lucy tell Rickie she was pregnant, while Ross has to go to great lengths to (unsuccessfully) hide his fling with the photocopier girl from Rachel. Though sexual and cultural mores change, the basic dynamic of sitcoms does not—there’s a misunderstanding of some sort, or somebody transgresses in a non-egregious manner and, instead of just fessing up, goes to elaborate lengths to conceal or fix things. Hijinks ensue.

Part of the exercise is to make these structural elements clear and show how they manifest the different medias’ economic preoccupations while also articulating the cultural and societal preoccupations of the moment, how they act to critique or reinscribe the moment’s normative discourse (often both). Popular culture, I say in my introductory lecture, doesn’t want you to think about it. So let’s spend the next twelve weeks thinking about it, developing a toolbox of reading strategies to better help cultivate—to borrow an expression from Noam Chomsky—your intellectual self-defence.

II. Of course, popular culture is not without its paradigm shifts; one might indeed argue that popular culture is nothing but paradigm shifts, basically an accelerated series of transformations in step with the technological advances of its hardware: radio to cinema to television; within television, from broadcast to cable to streaming; in music, from vinyl records to tape to CDs to MP3s to streaming, and the rise and decline of radio as the principal method of dissemination; the ever-evolving technology of movie making from silent to sound to colour, from practical effects to CGI; the rise of the internet and its slow then sudden supplanting of traditional media, bringing us to the current morass of social media and YouTube and TikTok, which have had material impacts on the craft and creation of TV, film, and music. And I’m not even getting into the quarter-trillion dollar behemoth of the video game industry5 and all the cross-pollination that happens there.

The question I find myself mulling, as I start to pull my material together for my fall’s pop culture course, is how substantive or superficial these many paradigm shifts have been. In one sense, for however revolutionary the change from radio to television was, it didn’t effect much structural change. The earliest TV series were frequently adaptated from radio shows—Gunsmoke, Ozzie and Harriet, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Jack Benny Program, and The Lone Ranger, among many others, comprised a significant portion of early television’s nightly programming.6 The nightly news, along with public-interest informational programming, were delivered in more or less the same formats, except that now you could see who was talking. This visual dimension put a new premium on the attractiveness of the hosts, but that was cosmetic and wasn’t (yet) a gamechanger.7

The rapid transformations of media over the course of the twentieth century—really, in the post-WWII period—have arguably been more a matter of amplification than structural change. Which is to say: there’s so much more of it, across platforms both new and old, that the sheer scale of the industry makes it inescapable in ways it wasn’t before. Industry, indeed, is the operative word here, as in “the culture industry” as theorized by German critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their defining mid-century essay of that title.8 Oversimplifying radically, their basic argument is that when culture becomes an industry, i.e. when creative cultural production becomes driven by the profit motive at scale, the principal determining concern becomes maximizing the size of the audience. Hence the product (art) is tailored such that it appeals to the largest possible number of people, making it by necessity inoffensive, familiar, and safe. What results is a narrowing of the artistic potential of creative production such that a given product—whether it be a film, musical act, new car, etc.—will differ only superficially from other such products.

It is at this point in the lecture when I often show a series of slides of boy bands through the years.

Boy bands are, you might argue, a bit of an unfair metric for popular culture more broadly, as they represent a particularly manufactured form of anodyne pop music.9 And, well, yes—that’s sort of the point, insofar as they make explicit the tendencies Adorno and Horkheimer outline. There are, naturally, counterarguments—examples of exceptions that both prove the rule, and exceptions demonstrate genuine resistance to the levelling effects of the culture industry.10 Overall, however, the basic thesis is difficult to rebut, especially as the culture industry has grown by a magnitude and corporate juggernauts like Disney and Amazon assimilate more of what we watch, read, and listen to like insatiable Borg cubes.

All of which is by way of returning to my earlier question about just how substantive these many paradigm shifts have been, when the economic imperatives underwriting mass cultural production don’t change, and the modes of cultural production don’t get upended. Considering that Adorno and Horkheimer first articulated their culture industry thesis in 1947, it has proven remarkably durable through the myriad media transformations of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. There’s a reason it’s a reliable staple on popular culture courses like mine.

III. That being said, if I’m doing a deeper dive in advance of my pop culture classes this coming year, it’s because it does feel like things have been upended in some significant ways.

I don’t mean with regards to AI, though I also don’t not mean AI; if anything, AI just represents a further, and so far the greatest, amplification of the broader trends of social media and streaming. Three years ago, when I picked up the pop culture course again after not having taught it since 2017, I realized one of the key things I had to decide was: which streaming services would I oblige my students to subscribe to? That was, after all, the most straightforward way to access a critical mass of potential course content. Past strategies for guaranteeing access to multimedia material—most commonly, making sure it was available for viewing/listening at the university library—felt positively quaint in a brave new world in which students most commonly consume media on their phones, tablets, and laptops.

It is in part this shift in the hardware of media consumption that signals a sea change that is more than superficial. On one hand, screens have dominated popular culture since the advent of cinema; to make a terribly disingenuous argument, the difference between IMAX and your smartphone is just a difference in degree. But of course, we know that’s a disingenuous argument, not least because the IMAX screen isn’t portable and makes us subject to the whims of somebody else’s programming. The portability of our media hardware parallels the rise of streaming’s everything-everywhere, always at your fingertips, personally tailored programming on demand. The knock-on effects of the proliferation of both available content and the means by which to personalize consumption—untethered from any need for sociality—fundamentally changes the ground on which a course on popular culture rests.

Which isn’t to say that Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry thesis is no longer applicable—to the contrary, it’s more relevant than ever. Ditto for other foundational theoretical texts of the study of popular and mass culture, from Walter Benjamin through Marshall McLuhan (all of whom with get a thorough airing in my class). But it has been becoming increasingly clear that the framework on which I’ve built my previous classes needs some renovation. One of the big ones will be to focus more specifically on the hardware of mass culture: from radio to the television set and cinema screen to smart phones. Hence why my course poster features Orson Welles: the very first thing we’re going to be doing is the 1938 Mercury Theatre production of War of the Worlds, which notoriously sparked a panic among listeners who believed an actual Martian invasion was under way.

The course is still being constructed. But as I said at the start of my most recent post, one way I mean to continue being productive here at The Magical Humanist while also teaching a full course load is to post about what I’m teaching and sharing my lectures, er, thoughts in this space as I go.

So: more to come!

My wife and I frequently have occasion to observe that our cats are SUCH weird little guys. Case in point is Gloucester here in a fairly typical resting pose on the new couch.

NOTES

Its been a while since I’ve done one of these! It’s been a busy two and a half months of reading and researching and writing, with this last activity divided between working on the sabbatical novel and writing essays for this space. I’ve been noodling about with a post on the novel itself—specifically, the exercise of writing a fictionalized version of my maternal grandfather, the protagonist of the story—so you can look forward to seeing something like that appear here soonish.

I also REALLY need to get started on my course prep for the fall term. I’m teaching two courses, “Critical Introduction to Popular Culture,” a second-year course, and “Southern Gothic,” a third-year. Part of my winter sabbatical has been devoted to thinking through the problem of our brave new AI-saturated world and how to deal with that in the classroom—which really is the problem of constructing assignments that can’t simply be fed through ChatGPT and creating incentives for my students to, you know, actually do the reading.

Which, I’m sure, will be fodder for at least a few future posts. So too will be the course content: my writing here at The Magical Humanist tends to follow whatever is uppermost in my mind in a given moment; also, I’ve more or less managed to remain steady in my once-a-week posting when I’m also teaching by writing stuff directly lifted from my course readings and lectures (case in point: the Poem of the Week, which had a brief but prolific run during last year’s fall semester). Which is by way of saying that you can look forward to an increasing number of essays on topics related to pop culture and the southern gothic (and I would not be surprised to see some overlap) as the year goes on.

But that’s to come! For now, a recap of my reading, watching, and listening …

Currently Reading: Dan Simmons, The Terror (2007). Dan Simmons has the distinction of writing a novel that is deservedly a bona fide SF classic, Hyperion (1989). I’ve read a handful of his other novels, all of which I’ve enjoyed; the first few times I saw The Terror on the shelf at the bookstore—notably, in the horror section, not SF—I was intrigued by its description as the story of the doomed Franklin Expedition, in which Sir John Franklin took the ships Erebus and Terror in an ill-fated search for the North-West Passage through the arctic.1 In Simmons’s retelling, the cold and ice aren’t horror enough, for the crews of the ships are being hunted by some mysterious creature.2

In spite of my regard for Simmons’s fiction, I never picked it up. Then I watched the AMC series The Terror, whose first season adapts the novel.3 I immediately binged it, both for my long interest in the novel and for the fact that it stars Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin and Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, the captain of the Terror. Going then to pick up the novel I discovered it was no longer available. So when I saw it on the shelf recently, I immediately nabbed it.

And it’s good! It’s a very granular and (from what I can tell) historically accurate rendition of what an arctic expedition of its sort was like … which has the effect, among other things, of making me wonder why on earth anybody would subject themselves to that torture. I’m about a quarter of the way in and I’m really enjoying it.

Previous reading

James S.A. Corey, The Faith of Beasts (2026). Corey is the pseudonym for the writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who gifted the world the magisterial nine-novel series The Expanse—a compulsively readable and blisteringly smart opus that spawned one of the best SF television series ever made.4 The Faith of Beasts is the second novel in their new three-book series. In The Mercy of Gods (2024), a human-occupied planet that is not Earth is attacked by the Carryx, a massively advanced alien species solely bent on galactic conquest. Their only consideration for the other species they conquer is: Can they be useful to the Carryx? If yes, they can live as subject peoples. If not, they are simply exterminated. A handful of humans are brought to the Carryx home world with the one task of proving their usefulness in order to spare all humanity.

The Faith of Beasts continues the story in a variety of satisfying ways. The first novel engaged in a lot of setup and left a lot of questions unanswered—one of the big ones being, how did humans get to this planet that isn’t Earth? Does Earth still have people? I’m curious how book three will resolve everything but will definitely be reading the hell out of it when it’s released.

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). I watched the film adaptation of this a long time ago, and it was just OK. The book itself I picked up as part of my preparation for my upcoming course on southern gothic, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good it is. Technically it’s a true crime nonfiction about the several trials of millionaire antiques dealer Jim Williams, who is ultimately convicted for the murder of his young lover Danny Hansford. Technically that’s what it’s about, but really it’s about the city of Savannah, Georgia, and its colourful cast of characters whom John Berendt encounters while living there for the several years it takes to cover the trials. It takes a while to start really cooking, but when you’re about a third of the way in it’s hard to put down. The narrative, such as it is, is slow and meandering as befits a sultry southern climate.

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto (2021 & 2023). I’ve written about Colson Whitehead here before, specifically his short and devastating novel The Nickel Boys (2019). These two more recent works are somewhat more upbeat, even rollicking at times. Ray Carney is the owner of a furniture dealership in Harlem in the 1960s. His deceased father was a notorious crook, a sort of jack of all trades of crime. Though Ray made a point of growing up on the straight and narrow, it’s more or less impossible to be a business owner in New York City without brushing up against the shady side of the street—cops need to be paid off, local gangsters need their taste, and as someone who initially dealt in both new and used furniture, there was never any shortage of stock that had fallen of the back of a truck, sold to him by local hoods. As the years pass and he becomes more prosperous and established, so too does he become a more accomplished fence.

These novels are the first two of a trilogy; the third, Cool Machine, is set to be released July 21. I cannot wait. I loved these novels, whose two main characters are Ray and Harlem itself. Whitehead’s written, among other things, a love letter to a specific urban space as it changes over time. Harlem Shuffle takes place in the 1960s, Crook Manifesto in the 70s, and Cool Machine will be in the 80s. Each is essentially three novellas, spaced a few years apart over their respective decades. In a perfect world they’ll be adapted by HBO: six-episode seasons, two episodes per chapter, ideally with David Simon (The Wire, Treme) in the executive producer role and a Black auteur like Ryan Coogler or Barry Jenkins as showrunner.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946). Another book read in the name of fleshing out my background reading for teaching southern gothic in the fall.5 As I read it, I thought: this is a good candidate for the always-ongoing Substack literature debates over “difficult” books and, to a lesser extent, the parallel argument over “classics” (to wit: to read or not to read). To be clear, All the King’s Men is not difficult per se, but it is long (almost 700 pages), ponderous in parts, and unapologetically meandering. My general sense as I read it is that it shouldn’t be considered a difficult novel, but in the current climate probably would … and frankly as a candidate for being included in any non-graduate-level course, it’s a nonstarter.

ANYWAY. That’s neither here nor there. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, a fictionalized retelling of the corrupt and authoritarian political career of Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-1932, then elected senator in 1932. His prospective presidential run was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1935. Long is a cautionary tale for the present day: a populist who upended the establishment, but who in the name of pursuing what was in some ways a progressive agenda created the most autocratic political regime since Tammany Hall.6 Robert Penn Warren fictionalizes Long as Willie Talos7 and tells his story from the perspective of Jack Burden, a former journalist who becomes an aide to Talos. The narrative has at once an epic quality evocative of Melville, while also managing to communicate the claustrophobia of the big fish in a small pond that can often mark local politics. The prose ranges between the tersely observational and expansive and hallucinatory in a manner that can seem both homage and parody of Hemingway and Faulkner.8

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). Aaaaaand another novel read in preparing for teaching southern gothic. Unlike All the King’s Men, which was always already not an option because of its length, McCullers’s debut novel was a candidate for the reading list in part because it’s invariably included in any list of southern gothic classics. I started with high hopes, but it doesn’t make the cut. It has many of the key elements of the subgenre I’m looking for, but I found the story overall less than compelling. It’s a lovely character study, to be sure—each chapter works more or less as a short story, and the novel as a whole ambles interestingly along, with a shift in perspective each time, with the connective tissue being how each character interacts with all the others. Interesting, a pleasant read, but it faced stiff competition (Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Octavia Butler, among others).

Watching

Shrinking. I’ve mentioned this show a few times here, and over the past month and a half my wife and I watched all the extent episodes (up to the end of season three).

One of the show’s creators, Bill Lawrence, is also responsible for Ted Lasso—for which he hired Bret Goldstein as a writer and then as one of the stars—as well as the recent Steve Carell vehicle Rooster. He collaborated on Shrinking with Bret Goldstein again (who again also played a role on the show). This trio of shows has a particularly distinct flavour of optimism and uplift, which is consonant with the shift of sitcoms in the 2010s away from the sort of acerbic irony that marked the late 1990s and early aughts. Shows like Seinfeld embodied this earlier tendency, in part (I would argue) as a very specific critique of the sitcom as form—if Seinfeld was about “nothing,” that was a reflection of the vacuity of broadcast TV more broadly and sitcoms specifically. This ironic detachment had its apotheosis with Arrested Development, which depicted well-meaning characters like Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) as delusional, whose self-importance made them oblivious, and everybody else as, variously, amoral, selfish, hurtful, or simply terrible.

While some shows like this persisted into the 2010s,9 we see a shift in this period. If acerbic irony was the keynote of the aughts, earnestness becomes the order of the day in the critical mass of sitcoms that follow. A good case in point is Community, which has all the hallmarks of a postmodern ironic self-reflexivity, but employs these qualities essentially as misdirection as it ends up being a show manifestly about, well, community. Similarly, we can actually see the shift from irony to earnestness occur over the lifespan of The Office, as it slowly sheds the British source code’s cruelty and warms to its characters. It’s notable that a co-creator of the American Office was Michael Schur, as he goes on to be responsible for what I would consider the signal earnest sitcoms that express a profound optimism about people: Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, and Rutherford Falls (this last being a series that really deserves more attention than it received). Other examples, not created by Schur: Schitt’s Creek, Abbott Elementary, Bob’s Burgers.

All of which is by way of saying that if Michael Schur’s shows comprise their own subgenre of earnest sitcom, Bill Lawrence is coming into his own in the same way. And that Shrinking is a hilarious and heartwarming show.

Movie Night! A little while ago my wife lamented the fact that we don’t tend to watch a lot of movies—either in the theatre or at home. So we decided that Saturday night will be movie night, in which we’ll select a film that at least one of us—but ideally both of us—hasn’t seen. We promptly broke that rule on the second Saturday when my wife, apropos of nothing, started jonesing to watch Zoolander (2001) again. So we did, and (1) it was even funnier now than when I watched it the first time, and (2) I was transported back to that time when, as an adjunct professor in the later stages of my PhD, all my students were given to saying something or other was “So hot right now!”

Otherwise, however, we’ve hewed to the basic rule. We’ve watched a fairly eclectic bunch of films: starting with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which we missed when it was in theatres early this year; rather different in tone than last year’s 28 Years (which I wrote about here at some length), but we both really enjoyed it. It was far more focused on Ralph Fiennes’s eccentric Dr. Kelson, which can only make things better. Zoolander came next, and then we watched Parasite (2019), which is quite possibly one of the best films of the past decade. Then for a change of pace, a classic: Dial M For Murder (1954), which was one of the few Hitchcock films neither of us has seen. In trying to think of what to see next, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any of the recent films by Wes Anderson—the last one was The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). So I suggested the most recent, The Phoenician Scheme (2025). And, well, Wes Anderson is reliably entertaining, even when he’d phoning it in (as some elements of this movie felt), and what’s more, nobody does a better job of creating a stylized visual world that at every moment reminds you you’re watching a movie (to the point where I had a brainwave to include The Phoenician Scheme on my pop culture course—more on that soon).

Last week, we watched one I’d seen but she hadn’t, a movie she was quite miffed to learn I’d watched without her—Ari Aster’s sophomore outing Midsommar (2019). As is my wont with horror and scary films, I watched it on my iPad while playing a computer game, and realized … well, not that scary. Disturbing? Fucked up? Yes and yes. And very much an instant classic of the folk horror subgenre, as well as Florence Pugh’s coming-out party for her enormous talent. Re-watching it with my full attention brought home just how artfully and beautifully made it was.

And finally, we most recently watched Project Hail Mary, which we’d also missed while it was in theatres. But it had recently become available to rent, and in the words of one of its main characters, we thought it was AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE. It was always in danger of becoming treacly, but always managed to back away from that precipice, not least because of Ryan Gosling’s charm. It was also very obviously from the same brain that gave us The Martian—an extended exercise in competence porn, which frankly is something I can’t get enough of in our present moment.

Listening

Audiobooks: I listened to Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, which is one of those audiobooks I felt compelled to immediately go buy in hard copy to have for future reference. It’s short and tightly written and does an excellent job of analysing not simply Elon Musk but how he has come to embody a particular ideology and way of thinking. Hence “Muskism”—not just the person, but what he’s wrought. It was, to be sure, an infuriating read at times; at points when I was listening to it at the gym, I worried that it might cause an aneurysm if it raised my blood pressure at a moment of a particularly heavy lift (I’m only partly joking). It is however worth the price of admission simply for the epilogue, in which the authors essentially write a Musk-inspired piece of “utopian” SF based entirely on things Musk has said or tweeted. It’s a chilling vision of the future, and one that eerily resembles the first chapter of the sort of classic dystopian novel that begins in a far-too-perfect antiseptic society.

I’m currently about halfway through Ben Rhodes’s All We Say: The Battle for American Identity. Rhodes was Barack Obama’s lead speechwriter for foreign policy, and in the last few years was also Deputy National Security Advisor. He is currently co-host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the World, as well as being active in a variety of other political endeavours. I’ve read his two previous books, The World as it Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018) and After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made (2021), both of which are thoughtful and extremely engaging and well written. Rhodes is one of the smarter people out there, with a wealth of experience from eight years in the Obama administration, and a humane and incisively honest voice. All We Say is, in part, an attempt to tell the story of America and American identity by way of fifteen landmark speeches—starting with Benjamin Franklin’s address to the Congressional Congress endorsing (with reservations) the new constitution, up to Obama’s 2015 speech at Selma and Trump’s 2017 inaugural address. Yes, Trump—Rhodes doesn’t just play the hits, he also includes speeches by people whose politics he abhors, but who played a significant role in shaping American self-fashioning. Indeed, his introduction focuses on J.D. Vance’s notorious 2025 speech to the Claremont Institute, in which he argues against the notion of America as a “credal” nation.

Music: Lately I’ve been revisiting Tracy Chapman a lot while I’m writing. There is little in her songbook that isn’t superior, that isn’t the kind of thing your average singer-songwriter wouldn’t give a limb to have written. She is something approaching an antidote to the present moment: a soulful, poetic, humane voice that throbs with both pathos and hope. Though it’s hard to choose a favourite, the song I find myself listening to most frequently is “Change.” It’s simple in construction, but devastating in implication: a series of rhetorical questions that posit revelations, followed by a simple question: “Would you change?” The refrain then challenges you to consider what would inspire change in your heart:

How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses? How much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?

Other Stuff: Painting! New Couch! New Shelves!

Though sometimes it’s difficult here in Newfoundland to discern, summer is upon us, which means we’re getting busy with house projects—gardening, landscaping, spring cleaning. We repainted our living room and dining room area in anticipation of a new couch. My wife wracked her brain to figure out what sort of art to hang over it, and had the rather brilliant epiphany of making two large prints of Elven runes of our first names’ initials. I think it looks lovely:

As part of my personal project of finally organizing my library both at home and work, I installed two new sets of shelves, both of which filled quite rapidly. These ones hang on the wall to my left when I’m sitting at my desk, and loom rather comfortingly over me as I write.

That’s it for now. Here’s your cat of the week: Catesby making herself comfortable on the new couch under my wife’s S-rune.

NOTES

pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
—e.e. cummings

I. Between an infinity of possible worlds in the multiverse, the dream of galactic empires comprising thousands of planets, and the unthinkable resources needed to power interstellar travel, it would seem my theme for the past month and a half or so has been one of excess and hyperbole in the SF imagination. My mind is still there: I want to noodle about in that space1 awhile longer in this essay. I’m thinking now of what I like to call “hyperbolic worlds,” which I use to mean, variously, megastructures like the Dyson Sphere or the Ringworld of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or else planets that have been reengineered—terraformed, transformed into massive spacecraft, or, as in Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series, landscaped into a ten million mile long river valley (for reasons).

I started thinking about this topic again, which is something I’ve pondered since first reading Ringworld (1970), after quoting, in my post-before-last, from the section in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that describes the ultimate decadent industry catering to the hyper-wealthy: “custom-made, luxury planet-building” (89). When Arthur Dent, in his picaresque, stumbling travels, finds his way to the planet Magrathea, he is taken by a man with the unfortunate name Slartibartfast into the planet to see the “factory floor.” Slartibartfast warns Arthur, “the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too … large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace” (121). The description Douglas Adams offers of the space into which they emerge is a useful starting point. Though Arthur suddenly gets “a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like,”

It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite. It was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

We literally cannot think the infinite—as my favourite math teacher in high school always emphasized, infinity is not merely a very large number but is something else entirely. In our blinkered way, however, we gesture at it precisely by thinking in terms of “very very very big” things: the Grand Canyon, for example, or imagined megastructures, and we ascribe godlike abilities to those who build or create such things.

This last element is an interestingly recurrent tendency in SF—interesting in part because, though SF on balance bends toward a markedly secular worldview,2 our stubborn predisposition to imagine gods and godlike beings persists when the scale of fictional ideation approaches (to use Adams’s phrasing) “the impression of infinity.” We might indeed tweak Arthur C. Clarke’s infamous dictum that “a sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic” to note that, similarly, a sufficiently advanced alien species will appear godlike … or at least leave behind artifacts that the human imagination cannot help but attribute to gods. It’s a common enough trope that a representative list of examples only scratches the surface: the Progenitors of Star Trek, the Shadows and Vorlons of Babylon 5, the Old Ones of H.P. Lovecraft’s legendarium, the mysterious creators of the protomolecule in The Expanse, the Overlords of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), the various tiers of gods in the MCU (Asgardians, Celestials, Galactus); and, as I’ll discuss further below, the Puppeteers and Pak Protectors of Niven’s Ringworld books and the “Ethicals” of Farmer’s Riverworld series.

I could go on. But the point is that there seems to be an inescapable element of the human imagination that yearns toward a sense of higher power, be that in the form of gods or God or the Universe itself—or humanity in a later stages of technological evolution.

II. I was first turned onto Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books when reading Postmodernist Fiction (1987) by Brian McHale as an undergrad. He mentions them in the broader contexts of SF’s analogues and overlaps with postmodernist fiction; the four-novel series3 takes place on an Earth-like planet (which could possibly be Earth) that has been terraformed into a single river valley ten million miles long winding like a classical unicursal labyrinth across the entirety of the planet’s surface. Along this river, the entirety of humanity that has ever lived, from the first homo sapiens up to a point early in the twenty-first century—some thirty-six billion people—finds itself resurrected. How did this happen? Who orchestrated this? And perhaps most importantly, why?

Intrigued by the premise, I went searching for the books, only to discover they were then out of print. I finally scavenged the first two at a second-hand bookstore and found the latter two in the university library. Serendipitously, in that same used bookstore I stumbled across Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), a novel I’d read about but never found among the shiny new paperbacks of regular bookstores.4 So it was that in reading Farmer and Niven closely upon each other and McHale’s theoretical framework in my mind that I first hit on the idea about writing something with regard to “hyperbolic worlds.”

That was nigh on thirty years ago. Some ideas, it seems, braise for longer than others.

Farmer and Niven imagine different hyperboles: the former a world reshaped, the latter a megastructure that seems to be an artifact of a now-vanished hyper-advanced alien civilization. The Ringworld—whose familiar but diminished form I encountered on first playing Halo—is a ribbon one million miles wide and whose circumference is approximately the same as the Earth’s orbit. Its surface is habitable, featuring plains and forests, mountains and rivers and seas, all presumably as artificially engineered as the ring itself, which is built of an unknown high-tensile material.

This implications of this startling structure terrify an advanced alien race known as the Pierson’s Puppeteers. Given that the overriding trait of this species is an overabundance of caution, they hire the human Louis Wu to investigate. Who built it? And how?

The question of why, by contrast, is easy to discern. When one of Louis’s companions asks, he offers the most obvious answer.

Teela’s eyes had been turned to the ceiling, and her lips had been moving silently but rapidly. “He’s right,” she said. “The math works out. But what’s it for? Why would anyone build such a thing?”
“Room.”
“Room?”
“Room to live,” Louis amplified. “That’s what it’s all about. Six hundred trillion square miles of surface area is three million times the surface area of the Earth. It’d be like having three million worlds all mapped flat and joined edge to edge. Three million miles within aircar distance. That’d solve any population problem.” (80-81)

Larry Niven has said he conceived of the Ringworld as a compromise on the Dyson Sphere, a megastructure that wouldn’t ring a star so much as enclose it entirely. Physicist Freeman Dyson proposed the idea in a 1960 article in Science magazine as a means by which hyper-advanced alien civilizations could harness something approaching the totality of a star’s radiant energy.5 The principal disconnect between Dyson’s proposal and Niven’s compromise is the purpose imagined: Louis Wu sees the Ringworld as a solution to overpopulation, while Dyson’s sphere addresses a need for energy. Though it has been adopted in SF as a rigid sphere with a habitable surface,6 Dyson imagined it comprised of a swarm of satellites.

Dyson credited his conception to the pioneering English SF author Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker (1937). Though he modestly suggested a more deserved name would be “Stapledon Sphere,” the description in the novel is blink-and-miss-it, a passing reference to stars “surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use” (380). I’d say Dyson’s extrapolation earns him naming rights, though that’s a little bit beside the point here. The broader significance of Stapledon’s work in this context is that the scale of the Dyson Sphere—itself a magnitude larger than the Ringworld, which in its own turn is a more hyperbolically imagined megastructure than Farmer’s Riverworld—is miniscule in the galaxy-spanning journey of Stapledon’s narrator.

Reading Stapledon’s fiction is a bit of a trip. Star Maker is often paired with his earlier novel Last and First Men (1931),7 which reads less as a novel than a chronological history of an imagined future. Last and First Men chronicles human evolution projected over two billion years. Not to be outdone in scope, Star Maker follows the saga of an Englishman whose consciousness, for reasons and by means that remain unexplained, is transported away from his body. Suddenly able to explore outer space, he travels to the stars and encounters other disembodied consciousnesses, with whom he merges. The ever-growing collective explores different planets and recounts their alien inhabitants and civilizations, moving on to stars and sentient galaxy-birthing nebulae, and, ultimately, the understanding that this universe is just one reality in an infinite multiverse.8

I highlight Stapledon’s work and his influence on subsequent SF in part because he exemplifies the tendency I’ve been exploring in my most recent essays—the tendency to think on grand scale, and the overlap between certain strains of SF with mythology and indeed mysticism. Though it tends to be understood as the more rational and secular genre in contrast to fantasy’s origins in romance and religion, SF frequently displays a similar propensity for finding mystery and transcendence in the unthinkable scale of the universe.

III. I remember my first glimpse of the Grand Canyon as a moment in which I had a fleeting glimpse of what animates the thinking of young earth Creationists. Among their various torturous “proofs” of the literal truth of Genesis, the Grand Canyon often features prominently as evidence of the Great Flood. What other force but the sheer power of God’s wrath visited on the world could have inflicted such a massive wound on the earth’s surface?

The vantage from where I first looked down into the Grand Canyon and then into its depths running away into the distance was at a lookout behind a low wall, set in the midst of a cluster of gift shops and interpretation centres, a village of touristy buildings immediately adjacent to the parking lot where I’d parked the rental car. What might in other contexts have felt like a kitschy pimple on a natural wonder faded to nothing in contrast to the view I was afforded: one of those awe-inspiring intrusions of the natural world, like a vast mountain or a tempestuous sea, that defies the human capacity to reduce or domesticate or otherwise overmatch it with our own manufactured monuments. It was a sublime experience in the true sense of the term, beautiful and terrifying, the latter not least because it was utterly indifferent to my puny human existence. I didn’t need to read the ubiquitous signs warning about the dangers of hiking too far into the canyon without proper supplies and an appropriate level of physical fitness—it was obvious at first glance it could consume me and not notice.

A much younger version of myself would have probably seen the hand of God at work. That the version of myself present in that moment saw millions of years of erosion and could read the aeons in the sedimentary layers did not denude the sublimity of the experience. Quite the opposite: the sensation of the vastness of time, looking down into what is essentially the river valley to end all river valleys, was palpable. I grasped the sort of confirmation bias the Grand Canyon offers its beholder, especially at first glance. Those inclined to see the Earth’s antiquity will feel the millions and billions of years embedded in the rock and stone. Those convinced of the literal truth of scripture will see the deep chasm as carved by the force of the Flood, within which one also discerns the infinite precision of God’s design, where no molecule of erosion is accidental.

These are two opposing conceptions of the infinite: the unthinkable vastness of the universe on one hand, an all-encompassing deity on the other. There is, to be certain, an enormous amount of real estate between an atheist’s awe at the universe and a personal God whose infinitude is, paradoxically, strictly circumscribed by Scripture; this spiritual spectrum covers an immeasurable range of belief. It took the Grand Canyon to give me a flash of empathy and even sympathy for the fundamentalist extreme. I had that moment, standing there at the lip of mind-numbing enormity, but only a moment. I snapped back to myself quickly enough, to my general sense of fundamentalism’s imaginative impoverishment—of its need to see the eternities of space and time contained in the claustrophobic confines of six millennia and needing to invent a conspiracy of scientists from Darwin onward who fabricate evidence of evolution and a planet of much longer vintage that a literal reading of the Bible provides. The elaborate complexities of such a supposition make the Big Bang seem almost banal in its simplicity.

IV. There is however a shared desire rooted in both extremes, as expressed in our more hyperbolic fictions. The earliest myths from across cultures, perhaps unsurprisingly, are usually preoccupied with the world’s creation. The earliest and most rudimentary iterations of such stories frequently take for their main characters the enormities of sky and earth, the heavens and underworlds, stars, oceans, mountains … often in a confusion of hard-to-picture, incestuous copulations and subsequent births, followed by yet more cosmic incest birthing a greater proliferation of aetiological gods. Earth and sky or sky and sea knock boots, as do night and darkness, giving birth, variously, to dream and eros and the sun, and so on. (I’m not being specific here to any one mythic tradition but am travestying the finer distinctions made by the Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians, among many other pantheons). The Judeo-Christian creation story is an outlier for how staid it is, depicting an OCD Supreme Being who ticks items off his to-do list with admirable dispatch and makes a point of leaving a day for self-care.

Whatever sense of enormity is lost in Genesis, John Milton reinstates in Paradise Lost: he describes the sphere of our known universe as tiny and barely visible in the midst of the infinitude of Chaos.9 As Satan makes his long journey from Hell to make mischief with God’s new pet project, he sees our world hanging from Heaven by a golden chain:

That Satan with less toil, and now with ease
Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light
And like a weather-beaten Vessel holds
Gladly the Port, though Shrouds and Tackle torn;
Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Farr off th’ Empyreal Heav’n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With Opal Towrs and Battlements adorn’d
Of living Saphire, once his native Seat;
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Star
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies. (II.1041-1055)

I had the great good fortune in the first year of my PhD to work as a teaching assistant for John Leonard, one of the world’s leading Milton scholars. In our first-year English survey, he made a point of emphasizing the scale of Milton’s universe, which dwarfs our world to an infinitesimal pinprick in the cosmos.10 On the blackboard he drew a rough approximation, with Heaven occupying the top, Hell the bottom, and Chaos in between. Our world—which is to say, our universe, which includes the sun, moon, and planets, and is bounded by the outer sphere of the stars—is a “pendant world,” hanging from Heaven by a chain, miniscule relative to the vastness surrounding it.

Pointing to the sketch of Milton’s cosmos, John observed that an argument could be made that Paradise Lost can be seen as an early precursor to SF, insofar as it features a rare depiction of interstellar travel within a universe much vaster than had been conventional to that point. With a handful of exceptions—some of which I’ll talk about momentarily—the model of the cosmos inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy was very specifically finite. The medieval Christian universe adopted this finitude; as Arthur Koestler asserts in The Sleepwalkers, his history of the Copernican Revolution, “The medieval Christian universe had hard, firm limits in space, time, and knowledge” (219). The world was created somewhere around 4000 BC, and would end in the possibly foreseeable future; in space, “the world was equally bounded by the ninth sphere, beyond which lay the heavenly Empyrean”; and finally there were “equally firm limits to the progress of knowledge,” all of which had been settled—religion by Scripture, geometry by Euclid, and physics by Aristotle. “The science of the ancients was taken as Gospel truth,” Koestler writes, “not because of any particular respect for the pagan Greeks, but because it was obvious that since they had come so much earlier they had harvested all there was to harvest.” The authority of the ancients rested “on the belief in the finite nature of knowledge.”

There had been a moment in Ancient Greece, Koestler notes, in which the sun-centred universe was proposed by a handful of philosophers and astronomers, most notably by Aristarchus of Samos. More significantly, Aristarchus made the more dramatic suggestion that, not only did the Earth orbit the sun, but that our sun was just one of countless stars in a potentially infinite cosmos. Unfortunately for the next millennium and a half or so of astronomy, Aristarchus’s theory was overruled by a scholar who went on to dominate western thought. Though “The Ionians had prised the world-oyster open, the Pythagoreans had set the earth-ball adrift in it, the Atomists dissolved its boundaries in the infinite,” Koestler writes, “Aristotle closed the lid again with a bang, shoved the earth back into the world’s center, and deprived it of motion” (61).

When looking back over the history of heliocentric versus geocentric conceptions of the universe, it’s important to keep in mind that the simple shift of the relative positions of earth and sun is far less radical than the conception of infinite space. Copernicus might have initiated a revolution, properly speaking,11 but he did so as modestly as he could manage, including a preface with the caveat that this sun-centred model was just a model for the purposes of more accurate astronomical prediction. But aside from the swapping of sun and earth, he hewed to the precepts of the Ptolemaic system, with its perfect circles, epicycles, and the ultimate boundary of the ninth sphere of the stars. And though the swap was meant as an elegant solution to the problem of the planets’ eccentric orbits and retrograde movement,12 what Copernicus produced was actually less accurate than the Ptolemaic tables.

Of course, once you move the Earth from the centre of everything, you’re upending a cosmology grounded in both the presumption of centrality to everything but also the understanding of the Earth as fallen and impure in comparison to the perfection of the heavenly spheres. The term “sublunary,” such as it appears in the poetry of John Donne13 refers to the gross and mortal. We are beneath the realm of the divine, and beneath us, in the medieval geography informing Dante’s Inferno, is Hell. The turfing of the Earth to the third orbit dislocates premises for both exceptionalism and original sin.

V. In one medieval model of the world, Hell was physically formed by Lucifer’s Fall. When he and his rebel angels were cast out of Heaven, they struck the world with such force that they punched a hole that caused a mountain to erupt at its antipode. The crater became the abode of Satan and his minions, and the mountain Purgatory. A little over three centuries later,14 Milton removed Hell from Earth and placed it outside our “pendant world” at the “bottom”15 of the gulf of Chaos; Hell in Milton’s telling is an unthinkably huge piece of real estate, but its vast diabolical geography finds itself dwarfed by an even vaster cosmos.

Milton’s remapping of the finite medieval universe to one that is potentially infinite—and what’s more, contains not just the infinity of God, but of Chaos—is as perfect an exemplar of the paradigm shift from the medieval to modern conception of the universe as you’re likely to find.

Or possibly not. On Sunday mornings I go to the gym with a good friend of mine who is a medievalist in our department; our conversations as we lift weights16 are always wide-ranging, enjoyable, and educational. And I’ve learned to temper my tendency to think in reductive medieval versus modern historical paradigms. In the early stages of starting to draft this essay, when it occurred to me to use Arthur Koestler’s assertion about the Christian medieval universe as having “hard, firm limits in space, time, and knowledge,” I thought it was probably wise to run it by my friend. When I read The Sleepwalkers for the first time in my early 20s, it was one of those life-and-mind-changing books for me. His characterization of the finite medieval universe sank deep. Thirty years later, however, it felt a bit reductive. When I quoted the passage to my friend, his face assumed the pained expression with which I’ve become familiar, whenever anybody (usually me) says something obtuse about the Middle Ages. “While that’s technically true,” he said diplomatically, “you’re right in thinking it’s reductive.” The medieval Christian universe was finite, but the way Koestler frames it—especially with regards to knowledge—is redolent of a larger tendency to think of medieval society as intellectually stunted and immature, which ignores the extraordinarily rich imaginative and intellectual life of the era.

A useful riposte to Koestler can be found with none other than C.S. Lewis, who effectively argued in The Discarded Image (1964) that the distinction between medieval finitude and the expansiveness of the modern universe is little better than a canard. He makes his case in a passage worth quoting in full, both for its substance and its lyricism:

You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt (98-99).

Lewis’s argument here, that an “unambiguously finite” universe serves to make clear the smallness of our world more effectively than can the unthinkable infinite, is of a piece with Douglas Adams’s observation that something immense but finite “[gives] the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.” Hyperbolic worlds and the megastructures of the SF imagination are a gesture at a sort of manufactured sublime in this vein, at once allegorical and metonymic, objects that stand in for an infinitude from which the human mind instinctively shrinks while simultaneously desiring to know.

Lewis didn’t see in the edifices of modern science anything resembling the expansiveness he attributed to medieval thought. The discoveries and innovations that revealed the heavens expanded the universe spatially while simultaneously serving to reduce it to the purely quantifiable. “On the imaginative and emotional level,” he writes, “it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations” (94). We hear here an echo of Romantic sentiment, perhaps, of Wordsworth’s admonition that “We murder to dissect” or Keats’s charge that science sought to “unweave the rainbow.”17 Or William Blake’s painting depicting Isaac Newton as a stunted, cramped pedant futzing about with a compass and paper with his back turned to the wonders of the world.

Like his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis spent the balance of his scholarly and creative life working toward a restoration of a medieval sensibility. In this respect he can be called antimodern, as he saw in modernity an arid positivism that voided the spiritual. His antipathy to modernist literature—T.S. Eliot was the bête noire for him and Tolkien and their Oxford circle—is perhaps ironic, given that a critical mass of modernists nurtured a similar disaffection with the historical moment. Though the experimentalism of the moderns offended Lewis et al’s sensibilities, works like The Waste Land (1922) exhibited its own search for a transcendence of modernity’s reductive rationality in its exploration of the Grail legend’s prehistory. So too the occultism of W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, or the delving into the internal infinitude of dreams by surrealism, or even Ernest Hemingway’s fascination with bullfighting, in which he saw vestiges of premodern mythic ritual.

VI. To be perfectly candid, this essay has been one of the most difficulty ones I’ve written here—and it has certainly gone on longer than I’d planned. So if you’re still with me, thanks for your patience. What started as a vague idea to write about hyperbolic worlds as a continuation of a thread started in my most recent essays has become something else. I haven’t stuck the landing here, but hopefully it’s been an interesting ride. As I wrote in my most recent post, writing can be like the path Bilbo describes passing by one’s door—you’re never entirely sure where it will take you.

So in lieu of a conclusion, I’ll say that this tension between the stultifying reductivity of instrumental reason and the human yearning for transcendence has hardly faded. In an algorithmically determined world in which our personal information is monetized and Oscar Wilde’s definition of cynicism as “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing” has been elevated to the basis of our digital economy, the ideation of an expanded universe (to coin an expression) reflects the ever-present yearning for something beyond.

You’ve earned your cat picture, if you’ve read this far. So here’s Bartleby, apparently in close consultation with the jackalope I bought my wife when we were first dating, who now hangs out with the cats on the bed.

REFERENCES

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan, 1979.
Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Arkana (Penguin), 1989 (1959).
Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP, 1964.
Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men & Star Maker. Dover, 1968.

NOTES

I. Since starting The Magical Humanist a year and a half ago, my goal has been to average one post a week, or at least four a month. Last year, March was the month I fell short, only managing two posts. This year, it was May, with only three.

And now it’s June fourth. May was an interesting month, writing-wise: “The Implausibility of Galactic Empires” ended up being my most-read and most-shared essay by quite a lot, and my readership keeps ticking up. As I get into below, my May essays also ended up developing along a common theme. The one I’m currently working on, and possibly the one after it, will continue with that theme.

But I’m writing this entr’acte because my current essay is proving difficult. This does not differentiate it from the three previous (well, two—my multiverse essay had been partly written, and so was a lighter lift). For whatever reason, writing these essays has been like pulling teeth. The one in process is like pulling teeth that are all running off madly in all directions. At the same time, I’m getting to stuff I’m finding really interesting; this was the case for my other May essays.

But I’m still a few days off from getting the one in process done. Hence this intercalary essay—because it’s been twelve days1 since I last posted, and I am determined to be relatively consistent here at The Magical Humanist and avoid my previous blogging tendency of periods of intense productivity interspersed will long periods of lying fallow. And even though I will never monetize this ’stack, I am gratified to see my readership grow and feel beholden to all you lovely people.

So we interrupt our scheduled essaying about expansive SF ideation to bring you an essay about essaying. And in case you were wondering, that’s why I have a picture of Michel de Montaigne at the top of this post. But more on that below.

II. For the past few months my Sunday ritual has been going to the gym for 9am and then meeting my friend Andrew after to have brunch, down a few pints, and exchange writing. You remember Andrew: he made an appearance two posts ago to talk about the multiverse in comics. He’s a great friend and English Department colleague, and he has a book coming out sometime soon, a collection of … well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

Most recently (this past Sunday) he sent me the book’s acknowledgements, in which he thanks everybody who helped in the writing, but also offers some context and background for the book. For several years now, he’s been posting lengthy Facebook updates that take the form of comic perorations picking up on fairly random topics and pursuing them to ends that are by turns parodic, satirical, absurd, or all of the above. For example: starting with the Coca-Cola ad that features two attractive young people at an Antarctic research lab, the coy love story takes a dogleg (pun intended) into an iteration of The Thing. Or that pre-movie feel-good Christmas ad about a young girl who watches movies with a snowman, whom she preserves year by year in an old fridge; in Andrew’s harrowing retelling, we get the snowman’s increasingly unhinged thoughts as he whiles away years in the cold and lonely darkness.

You get the idea. He’s performed some of these in stage shows and readings, and now we can look forward to seeing them collected in a book. (I’ll do some more focused log-rolling for it when its release is nigh.)

This is by way of context. In his afterword, he raises the question of just what to call these exercises. “Formally speaking,” he writes, “they’re an idiosyncratic lot, and maybe there’s no reason to impute unity to them at all.” He proposes a few possible ideas, but arrives at:

I’ve settled instead on “sallies,” a term that’s happily vague in its implications for form but still suggestive of experiment and play. Deriving from the Latin “salire,” to leap, “sally” evokes the circus and the diving board, the daring jump from one galloping horse to another, the virtuoso somersault. But it also acknowledges the risk of a trampling or a bellyflop. I’ve had a few of those. I haven’t included them in the book, though.

I quite love this designation, but it did oblige me to ask: how is this different from “essays” in the original meaning of the word? In its verbal form, “to essay” means “To attempt; to try to do, effect, accomplish, or make (anything difficult)” (OED). The essay in contemporary terms, especially those written for university classes, has calcified into a proscriptive form; its origins, however, lie in the sense of exploring, such as we find in the essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), whose writings are far more evocative of the sort of sallies Andrew describes, written, as he notes, “with only a hazy sense of their destination at the outset.” Reading Montaigne is an adventure, as you’re never entirely sure where a given essay is going to take you.

Of course, Andrew’s sallies are overtly inventive—though not fiction per se, they are fictional in their substance (mostly). As I mentioned to him when we met, the ones with a more satirical edge earn the moniker “sallies” for that term’s uses in military lingo, meaning exploratory, probing attacks—usually by a besieged force—to suss out the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.

So, sallies it is. The book’s title is How to Annoy the King of Spain and is set to be released sometime this autumn. More on that when we’re close!

III. My writing here in the past month has developed along a general theme of what in my upcoming post I’m calling “hyperbolic worlds.” An infinite number of alternate multiversal realities? Vast, galaxy-spanning interstellar empires? The nigh-infinite resources needed to travel such interstellar distances? I seem to have visions of galactic excess on my mind.

The development of this theme across multiple essays was not by design. It wasn’t a deliberate decision on my part to follow my multiversal ruminations with a consideration of the implausibility of interplanetary empires; but having written the latter, it made sense to pick up my threads of thought on the fantasy of resources, just as I feel compelled now to dust off some old ideas about SF’s subgenre of unthinkably huge megastructures or planet-wide terraforming and construction. You’re currently reading this entr’acte because my megastructure essay has been taking me down some unexpected paths and is doing its level best to drive me batty.

All of which has me thinking about the ways in which a given piece of writing can take you in entirely unexpected directions, even when it’s something that seems, when you start, to be quite straightforward. Sitting down to write can be like Bilbo’s cheerful warning about stepping out the front door: “It’s a dangerous business,” he tells Frodo, “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” So too, to again use Andrew’s lovely phrasing, when writing “with only a hazy sense of [your] destination at the outset.”

For me, having a destination is about the best writing hack I have. When I’m telling a story, I need to know how it ends. Both the novel I’m currently shopping and the one I’m currently writing came into focus for me when I could write the final scene in my mind.2 Hence, it was with a great sense of kinship that I encountered Terry Pratchett’s metaphor for writing a novel, which he likened to standing on the lip of a valley, peering across to your destination on the far side. You see where you’re going, but the valley below is shrouded in mist. Here and there hills and clusters of trees poke above the mist, giving you landmarks guiding your journey; presumably the trail is well marked in some places, while in others you have to hack and slash through undergrowth. And sometimes the trail unexpectedly forks. But you know where you’re going, or close enough to make no difference.

(On the other hand, I once shared my need to know how my story will end with a friend and colleague who is an award-winning author of numerous novels, and she was aghast at the idea of being so proscriptive in one’s writing. So your mileage may vary.)

Essays, however, are a difference species. I rarely know how I’m going to end things, and quite frequently when delivering a conference paper I’ve concluded by saying “And this is where my conclusion would be if I could write conclusions. Thank you.”3 This tendency is very nearly endemic at The Magical Humanist, to a large extent because I very specifically treat my writing here at least partly as works in progress. Hence a large number of my essays in this space end rather abruptly.

On the other hand, I’ve leaned into the more meandering qualities of essay-writing in the past year and a half. Maintaining a mostly-weekly posting schedule has (mostly) cured me of my old blogging habit of diving into an idea and feverishly writing several pages and then shelving it when I couldn’t stick the landing. Before starting The Magical Humanist, I had developed an embarrassingly larrge elephants’ graveyard of fragments and half-written pieces.4 Nowadays, the mostly-weekly habit has goaded me into sticking with an essay, even if it doesn’t resemble the original idea once I bring it to something resembling a conclusion.

The greatest salutary effect of this has been to remind me of a basic premise, one I repeatedly impress on my students: that writing, ultimately, is about process. A polished, finished product with which you’re happy is great, but its value lies in its contribution to a larger conversation, and in what it took to get you there. This in a nutshell is my principal beef with generative AI—it circumvents the process of writing and produces shit that, definitionally, has all been said before.

IV. Which brings me back to my header image, the patron saint of the exploratory essay, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

Montaigne wrote in sixteenth century France during a tumultuous period in which he was a landowner, a local magistrate, and, for a time, the Mayor of Bordeaux. He was a voracious reader, possessing a personal library of some fifteen hundred books, which he kept in a round tower on his estate. The tower was also his study: when he wasn’t riding his property and taking care of business both personal and political, he sat in his tower and read and wrote.

His writings were at once intensely personal and wide-ranging. As Sarah Bakewell writes in her critical biography of Montaigne How to Live (2010), in his essays he “presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened” (3-4). He thus wrote “exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles” (3). “On conscience,” “On cruelty,” “On not pretending to be ill”; anybody familiar with Montaigne knows, however, that whatever general topic is named in the title isn’t necessarily going to remain the author’s focus throughout the essay. Quite often, especially in his longer ruminations, he lets his thoughts take him down a variety of paths whose forks and turns are suggested by intriguing elements in whatever he just wrote or quoted.

Quotations—obviously emanating from a mind crammed with the wisdom accrued from absorbing countless books—feature quite prominently and often come at you with no warning. He peppers his essays with such passages, usually dropping them into his writing mid-flow in precisely the way I tell my students not to.5 Nor does he really signpost his essays—they are genuine excursions along his ambling currents of thought, not polemical but investigative and interrogative. All in all, he breaks most of the rules I set for my students’ essays.

Given that he does not pursue overarching agendas other than, as Bakewell notes in her book, seeking answers to the question “how to live?”, there is no obvious philosophical project that announces itself. By the same token, Montaigne’s essays are profoundly philosophical, both in the sense of how they are steeped in philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans and the Stoics, up to such contemporaries as Erasmus; and in their elemental, first-principles consideration of how to live virtuously and well. Taken in the aggregate, a sensibility emerges from his one hundred and seven essays: a humble humanism that values introspection and rumination, humane and generous behaviour, a love of reading, and the worth and indeed necessity of interacting with your fellow humans in good faith.

If and when I finally write my book on Terry Pratchett and magical humanism, there will be a chapter devoted to Montaigne and the consonance between his and Sir Terry’s worldviews as iterated over lifetimes of writing.

V. If Montaigne uses “essay” in the truly verbal sense of “to attempt,” the term has largely calcified for us into a proscriptive exercise, especially in the “keyhole” variant still ubiquitously taught in high school.

As I’ve written previously, the keyhole essay, while reductive, is not a bad thing; nor are its slightly more expansive university-level variants. The relatively rigid structure gives students still struggling with writing something on which to hang their thoughts, while more precocious writers can exploit the form to their advantage—like a talented poet with a sonnet—or, alternatively, it gives them something against which to rebel.

That being said, the longer I do this job the less enamoured I’ve become with proscriptive essays—both the peer-reviewed articles that are the coin of the professional academic realm, and the argumentative essays I’ve habitually assigned my students. Aside from the depredations of generative AI, which is effectively turning the traditional essay, pedagogically speaking, into a dead letter, I think a lot of the writing I have done here in the past year and a half has been a good lesson for me in the value of the informal essay. There’s a lot to be said for finding a happy medium between a scholarly academese and the purely personal rumination. Such indeed is Montaigne’s innovation: making the self the starting point, not as an exercise in solipsistic navel-gazing, but as the basis of a lifelong project of putting the self in conversation with other selves.

VI. Here on Substack I’ve encountered a lot of discourse on the longstanding writerly argument between pantsers and plotters. In the past I’ve also seen these personalities characterized as gardeners vs. architects. Gardeners are people who begin a project by scattering seeds and working with whatever grows; or, in the now more common lexicon, they compose by the seat of their pants, seeing what emerges. Their obvious opposites are the architects, the “plotters” who map out every aspect of their narrative, possibly on a whiteboard, detailing every granular element before sitting down to do the work of writing.

Though this opposition usually regards novel-writing, essays and non-fiction are also subject to the kind of happenstance that reliably gives plotters fits. Every academic I know, myself included, has had the experience of writing a five hundred or thousand word proposal for a conference paper, only to discover when sitting down to write it that it will absolutely not work as outlined. Ditto for the experience of a prospectus for a thesis; sometimes when I want to amuse myself or, alternatively, remind myself of the adage about God laughing at human plans, I revisit my original dissertation proposal.

I’ve thought for some time now that I’d like to trouble the simple opposition between pantsing and plotting by offering a third category: braising.

Braising is, as I wrote last year in “On Cooking Slow,” my favourite way to cook. There is something magical in the long, slow process of simmering unlikely or even distasteful ingredients over hours and having the alchemy of the process produce something genuinely delicious. Without rehashing6 the essay, I used slow cooking as a metaphor for thinking and creation.

As is often noted in the pantsing v. plotting debate, there probably isn’t a such thing as a pure pantser or pure plotter; they are the yin and yang of the creative process, with every pantser taking the occasional moment to plot out the next few steps, even if only mentally; and every plotter almost certainly has the experience of being surprised by the weirdly spontaneous turns their writing takes.

Missing from this equation however is the raw material of both processes, what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” and what Tolkien called the “Cauldron of Story.” That is to say: the stuff out of which inspiration emerges. I like to think of having a big pot in the back burner of my mind, always at a simmer, sometimes coming to a boil, working over the inedible lumps of ideas I dropped in weeks, months, often years ago. My completed novel currently in search of an agent had its point of origin when my wife and I drove past an old, derelict building that had once been a nurses’ residence. My wife, who is a health care worker and has a gothic-tinged fascination with abandoned buildings, said, “You should write a story about people who go into a building like that to take creepy photos, but who encounter real ghosts.” To which I replied: “Better yet would be people who try to do that, but for some reason always forget what they’re doing and come to themselves somewhere else entirely.”

That was some time in 2017. That thought went into the big pot, to be stirred and simmered. Time passed. Along the way, I taught my first course on Weird fiction, and started to develop a more serious research interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy in the present moment. The thought occurred to me, apropos of being the second reader on a pair of creative writing honours essays, both of which were gothic horror set in Newfoundland, that this easternmost province should really be more of a hotbed of Lovecraftian weirdness. And then I taught Weird fiction again, and again. The simmering idea about the derelict nurses’ residence that supernaturally repelled people who approached morphed into a hospital an hour outside the city, which had once been a boutique Catholic hospice that ostensibly catered to elderly dementia patients, but also took in unmarried pregnant girls. The girls could have their babies away from prying eyes and rejoin polite society unblemished, while their illegitimate infants would be adopted … or were they? While in the present day the hospital sits abandoned and ignored, until its property catches the eye of a shady real estate developer.

By late 2022, I’d almost arrived at a point where the stew in that pot was ready. But there was a missing ingredient. Then one day as I walked to the gym, the ending presented itself to me and everything came into focus—at which point I knew I’d be devoting the winter term of 2023, which I’d cleared of teaching, to writing this novel.

And though the destination was clear in my head, the writing of it was endlessly surprising. Characters I’d never planned on appeared in my text and said hi and took up residence. Stuff happened along the way that totally took me by surprise, all the while my narrative moved inevitably to the ending that had announced itself in the teeth of a November wind as I walked past a construction site.

But it had all emerged from that back burner pot, which had been blipping innocuously along for almost six years while its ingredients fused and merged. I plotted some, I pantsed a bit, but really the substance of what I wrote was the product of a long mental braise.

For today’s cat, here is Catesby (felis flooficus) staking out her place on our new couch.

REFERENCES

Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Vintage, 2010.

NOTES

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I never know which of these essays I write here will hit a nerve or find some traction, but my most recent post has gone about as viral1 as I ever go—more likes than even my most popular Terry Pratchett content, second-most restacks, and by far the most conversation in the comments section. It even inspired a very thoughtful response—not a rebuttal per se, but a complimentary critique by Roy J. Cobalta on his Strange Matter Substack, which nudged me on my thinking on a handful of points. All that’s after the ten days it took to write this essay, in which time I also gained almost forty new subscribers (welcome to the newbies!).

And yet when I posted it, I wasn’t entirely happy with it, thinking it a throwaway essay that, yes, I’d been mulling over for a long time, but which wasn’t quite what I’d wanted in execution. Meanwhile, the post before that, on our current proliferation of multiverses, was one I’d anticipated getting far more reads2 than it did.3

It is a mystery, albeit not an unwelcome one. Thanks to everybody who read and commented and/or restacked it. As is probably evident from the everything about it, these ideas are still embryonic, and all the comments pointing out the gaps in my reading or suggesting nuances I was either missing or papering over are much appreciated. As I like to tell my students, writing is about process as much as product—it’s about taking part in a larger conversation, one that is always ongoing.

In that vein, I’m picking up some threads from my last post—and a few implicit in my multiverses essay—to expand upon here. Specifically, I’m thinking in terms of the scale of some SF, both in terms of self-conscious galaxy-spanning vastness, but also the frequently unspoken scale of the resources that would be required to realize the space-faring fantasies of the kind of fiction I discussed in my peroration on galactic empires.

1. Improbability Drives

It is perhaps no surprise that in an era of climate crisis, in which humanity’s deleterious effects on global ecologies have earned the epoch-defining designation Anthropocene, we’d become more attuned to the question and representation of resources in our fiction and other works of creative imagination. As has been pointed out, however, it’s actually a bit bizarre that we’ve rarely had such preoccupations in the past. A pair of my colleagues in the English department launched a research project in 2012 that essentially started from a basic, incontrovertible premise and a question it evoked. The premise: fossil fuels pervade everything we do—every aspect of our lives, from heating our houses to transportation to the asphalt on which we drive to the plastics that proliferate in our consumer goods. The question: why, given this pervasiveness, do we not have more art and literature preoccupied with the energy sources that simultaneously power and pollute our daily lives?

Fourteen years ago, in the initial seminars and public lectures inaugurating the project,4 a key issue was precisely the dearth of such novels as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1926), or Germinal (1885), Émile Zola’s novel about a coal miner’s strike. A large part of the effort involved teasing out the undercurrents of petrocultures in the totality of culture writ large. Fourteen years on, these undercurrents have increasingly become, well, currents, as film, fiction, and other media have increasingly foregrounded energy concerns, from films like Deepwater Horizon (2016), television series like The Rig, graphic narratives like Kate Beaton’s magnificent memoir Ducks (2022), as well as the ever-growing subgenre of “climate fiction,” which is prevalent enough to have earned the catchy short form cli-fi. My colleagues’ project, in hindsight, was serendipitously timed: it came on the cusp of a growth in scholarship that paralleled an explosion of works of creative imagination across media preoccupied with climate, energy, and scarcity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, SF has proven a fecund genre for the energy humanities. (Kim Stanley Robinson alone comprises a veritable juggernaut on this front.) Graeme Macdonald, a literature scholar who has contributed significantly to the development of energy humanities as an emergent field, makes the argument that SF is in fact uniquely situated to interrogate these questions.5 Discussing the iconic opening shots of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), in which Darth Vader’s gargantuan Star Destroyer pursues the small Rebel ship, Macdonald asks “What might such future combustion aesthetics reveal about the energy culture we presently inhabit and the horizon of expectations it generates?” (113). The brief pursuit in low orbit over Tatooine quite economically lays out the stakes of energy concerns, even if they’re never specifically addressed in the film. “Ten seconds confirm that entire galaxies are traversable,” Macdonald notes, “made reachable and accessible by the imposition of astounding, powerful, and commanding modern technology.”

Though, as Macdonald suggests, we’re probably more inclined “in an age of late energy anxiety, with mounting eco-critical interventions into sf criticism” to be attuned to the question of a Star Destroyer’s fuel consumption, it’s not as if the year of the film’s release wasn’t itself one of profound energy anxiety, with the oil shocks of 1973 and its gas rationing and long pump lineups still a recent memory. However much the power plants of the various starships6 seem remote from the internal combustion engines of our pedestrian reality, the pervasiveness of petrocultures inevitably link the exotica of ionic reactors and hyperdrives to fossil fuels in the collective imagination. “Oil is culture,” Macdonald asserts. Hence,

The gathering question of a world “After Oil” illumines the interpretive horizons of space opera’s grandiose expenditures. It also preoccupies the contracted visions of postapocalyptic fiction’s myriad collapse narratives, which convey entropic worlds of diminishing and unevenly distributed energy returns, amid the outbreak of resource struggles. Thus sf allows us not only to realize the nature of our long and ongoing addiction to petroleum but also the manner in which we have continually sought to occlude or sublimate the monstrous nature of our petromodern fantasy in order to drive an increasingly unsustainable petrolic life ever onwards. (115)

Part of the equation Macdonald here identifies is the very ease with which SF can elide issues of resources. The fantasy at the heart of the energy novum gives such license simply dint of being fantasy. At the same time, this elision potentially reminds us of a general lack of attention to resources in a critical mass of conventional fiction, as our readings of Jane Austen “have not worried about the reliance of the feedstock of Mr. Darcy’s horse,” nor in Tolstoy of “the coal extraction methods for Anna Karenina’s train” (116). And yet these energy considerations are always already present, there to be teased out in a manner not dissimilar from Edward Said’s reading of colonial contexts in the novels of Jane Austen (among others)—identifying, in the privileges and luxuries of the propertied classes of Regency England, the wealth and resources made available by the imperial project. While on one hand, Said argues, it is “too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or American culture … prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire,” it is also “historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies … that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured the West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire” (80).

Macdonald’s use of Star Wars as an example similarly reminds us that the extractive impetus of petrocultures is not merely consonant with the history of modern imperialism and colonialism but has almost invariably been inextricable from it. While George Lucas’s figuration of a galactic imperium is painted in the broadest strokes, frequently cartoonish in its fascistic villainy, it follows an intuition of the fundamentally exploitative nature of imperial extraction, a dynamic explored with significantly greater nuance and thoughtfulness in the prequel series Andor. Macdonald’s cheeky aside about how questions of resources in Star Wars might be seen as akin to “query[ing] the size of the gas station on the Death Star,”7 to a certain extent this is precisely what Andor’s creator Tony Gilroy does in the series’ second season.

Technically a prequel to a prequel—Andor ends where Rogue One (2016) begins—the series uses the armature of an Empire in the process of cementing totalitarian control as a means of exploring the mechanisms of bureaucratic tyranny and the fraught moral compromises necessitated by rebellion and revolution. In the background of it all is the manifestation of the Empire’s mission for total control, the construction of the Death Star. A post-credit sequence in season one’s finale episode shows the widgets Cassian Andor had built while incarcerated being used to assemble the Death Star’s planet-killing weapon. In season two, a central narrative arc concerns the acquisition of rare minerals necessary to construct the space station’s8 power plant. The minerals in question have only been found in the amounts needed on the planet of Ghorman, an innocuous world with a rural French flavour, whose principal industry is silk harvested from a species of spider indigenous to the planet. The minerals sought by the Empire have no use that anybody else can discern, but their extraction on the timeline the Empire demands will require the veritable destruction of Ghorman. Hence, a critical mass of season two’s story concerns the Empire’s machinations in manufacturing a crisis on Ghorman that will provide cover for them to forcibly displace the population in order to strip-mine the planet.

Though subtle by Star Wars standards, Andor quite explicitly yokes imperial expansion and consolidation to the plunder and extraction of resources. In so doing, Tony Gilroy et al don’t need much inventiveness for the narrative gestalt, as they merely transpose historical patterns into a speculative SF framework.9 As I’ll note in the third section of this essay, this is standard operating procedure for SF; it is also an element of the genre that the tech world seems incapable of understanding.

2. “A Jupiter’s Worth of Exotic Matter”

I remember listening, years ago, to the CBC’s science program Quirks and Quarks as I ran errands. That day’s subject was the warp drive of Star Trek. To wit: was this bit of foundational SF theoretically possible? Was there a future scenario in which we might use warp technology for faster-than-light (FTL) travel? To which a handful of guest scientists said: theoretically? Yes!

I won’t attempt to rehash the basic science for the reason that I’ve never quite wrapped (warped?) my mind around it. All I know is the essential premise: that a warp drive would putatively subvert Einstein’s stipulation of the impossibility of any object with mass exceeding light speed—as one approaches light speed, the amount of kinetic energy needed approaches infinity—by “warping” space/time. The various scientists being interviewed on Quirks and Quarks talked through the science in an admirably clear way, speaking with the sort of blithe confidence that implied we were just a few eureka moments away from zipping off to Tau Ceti.

The record-scratch moment came when one scientist was asked what would be needed to fuel the reactions powering a warp drive. It was the phrasing of the answer that has stuck with me, spoken in the same breezy tone as the rest of the interviews: “It would require a Jupiter’s-worth of exotic matter.” Wait. What? What did he mean, a “Jupiter’s-worth”? The mass of the planet Jupiter, he clarified.

Oh. That’s all? Well, then.10

In my most recent essay I talked about Darko Suvin’s theorization of the novum as the sine qua non of SF, the “new thing” that marks the technological leap from realism into speculative fiction (however “hard” or extrapolative the science may be). The novum of spaceship drives, whether sublight or FTL, is one of the most common—ranging from the scrupulous physics of the Epstein Drive11 in The Expanse, to the rubber science of warp drive in Star Trek, to the “Whee! Starfield!” of jumping to hyperspace in Star Wars, and all the variations in between, pretty much all exoplanetary SF necessitates this imaginative leap.

What it doesn’t tend to engage with is the energy required to fuel such propulsion, and what resources are needed. Of course, one additional novum (sub-novum?) often supplementing the innovation of these drives is the suggestion that they could run on very little and/or ubiquitously available fuel sources. Nuclear fusion has long been the dream on this front, as it theoretically could generate vast amount of energy from almost any matter. This was deployed to comic effect at the end of Back to the Future (1985), when, after spending the better part of the film agonizing over how to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to power Dr. Emmett Brown12 (Christopher Lloyd)’s flux capacitator—necessitating initially the purchase of plutonium, and then harnessing a perfectly-timed lightning strike—Brown returns from the future having outfitted the time-travelling DeLorean with a “Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor.” Into this he throws a banana skin, the dregs of a beer can, and then the can itself for good measure, all pillaged from the garbage. Deliberately or inadvertently, this moment functions as a shrewd sendup of a lot of SF handwaving: just a short jaunt into the future, and all Dr. Brown’s energy problems are resolved with an as-yet-invented innovation. (Meanwhile, we’re presently eleven years past the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II, in the midst of an emergent energy crisis with no home fusion devices to be seen; adding insult to injury, Biff Tannen has somehow been elected to a second term as U.S. president.)

Back to the Future is a useful example, both because it’s a rare instance in which we’re preoccupied with the cost of powering a SF novum, and the cheeky irony with which the film’s ending acknowledges this. Such instances of cost-consciousness are, in the critical mass of SF I’ve consumed, rare enough that they stand out when encountered. Such an instance is an offhand comment in Ender’s Game (1985), which struck me when I first read it. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, in which Major Graff impresses on Ender’s sister Valentine that his personal visit asking for her help is not something he does casually: “Valentine, it costs more money than your father will make in his lifetime for me to fly to earth and back to the Battle School again” (144). I did some back-of-the-envelope math on this, and it tracks. Barring any major financial windfalls between now and when I retire, my cumulative career earnings amount to a fraction of what it costs to launch a rocket out of the gravity well. If SpaceX succeeds in getting per-launch costs using reusable rockets down to a few million dollars, possibly the entirety of my life’s earnings would cover a single (small) rocket. At present, however, you’re looking at about ten million per launch. NASA’s price tag was more in the range of $50-60M, and for actual space missions like the recent Artemis moonshot, you’re looking at billions of dollars.

In the grander scheme of the American military-industrial complex and aerospace industry, the lifetime earnings of a comfortably compensated tenured professor amount to less than a rounding error. In the even grander schemes, promises, and prophecies of our current tech “visionaries”—forecasts which have become uncomfortably indistinguishable from the naïve utopianism of certain precincts of space opera—the wealth of nations and the totality of the world’s energy resources are, at best, an ante in the game the broligarchy imagines itself to be playing with infinitude.

3. The Resource of Fantasy

Bear with me here for a moment as I take a bit of a digression. I’ll come back to my main discussion, I promise.

Buckminster Fuller—philosopher, inventor, futurist, systems theorist, and possibly the last great American polymath—once offered a decidedly unscientific and profoundly humanist idea against the inevitable decay dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. The counterbalance to entropy, he posited, is people. Annie Dillard refined Fuller’s thought in Living by Fiction (1982), suggesting that perhaps acts of imaginative creation “actually weigh in the balance of physical processes.” In other words, “Thoughts count,” and “[a] completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe’s order. It remakes its share of undoing” (124). The cosmic counter to entropy, in other words, is imagination—fantasy as resource.

It’s a fond idea, and though obviously not a quantifiable one, it articulates an argument for the intrinsic value of the humanities. It is, indeed, a sensibility I’ve discussed at length in a variety of essays here, especially those preoccupied with Terry Pratchett. Sir Terry’s magical humanism is defined in part by the myriad ways, tangible and intangible, imagination defines humanity and extends and expands us beyond the purely empirical facts of our physical existence. This defining capacity for imaginative invention, from which we create such collaborative fictions as nations and laws and currency—as well as such abstractions as justice and value—is why the Discworld novels’ most nefarious antagonists are ethereal, ghost-like entities called the Auditors of Reality. They are so named because they assume the task of policing the boundaries of acceptable reality; in their conception, “acceptable” solely entails the purely empirical. As far as the Auditors are concerned, “for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space.” In their capacity as “auditors” of reality, “They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell,” but they become quite stroppy about anything stepping outside the strictly quantifiable. As such, they’re antipathetic to pretty much all forms of life, which tend to be messy and unpredictable. Humanity is the worst, the source of their greatest ire and angst, as it “practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot” (Thief of Time 16).

The idea that acts of creative imagination are a counterbalance to entropy isn’t, of course, meant to be taken literally. It certainly isn’t quantifiable: Dillard’s figuration of a completed manuscript sitting in a trunk has no measurable effect on the universe’s ultimate heat death. It was, however, presumably a labour of love that brought satisfaction or succour or hope to its author. People without hope, Margaret Atwood has said on more than a few occasions, do not write novels. Entropy in its various manifestations—death, failure, conflict and war, decay, decline and fall—comprises one of the greater themes in art and literature. The act of creative imagination, as Fredric Jameson argued, is at root about the symbolic resolution of intractable real-world contradictions; Northrop Frye characterized it as a form of collective utopian dreaming, even (or perhaps especially) when the works and stories themselves engage in dire or dystopian scenarios.

All of which is by way of saying that metaphor is the language we have for the intangible and the unquantifiable. Which is why (and here is where I bring things back around—thanks for your patience) when Elon Musk and his ilk say things like We’re going to turn science fiction into science fact!, they’re betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of just what SF is about. In an interview with Ars Technica discussing his book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025), Adam Becker takes aim at what he identifies as broligarchy’s inability to think in terms of metaphor and intangibles. Responding to a question about why futuristic narratives are so seductive, Becker says,

I think part of it is that it lines up with ideas about the future that have been sold to us for many, many years by, among other things, science fiction. I say this as an ardent science fiction fan. I am not saying that science fiction is the problem. I’m saying that taking science fiction seriously as a vision of the future is the problem.

The apparently congenital inability of tech billionaires to grasp the nuances of their favourite SFF has become so common as to be a joke: Jeff Bezos’s ingenuous love of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series that is predicated on a utopian future in which “people are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things” (as Picard tells an unfrozen Wall Street douche); Peter Thiel’s blinkered appropriation of Tolkien; or Mark Zuckerberg’s misapprehension of the “metaverse,”13 which quite possibly inspired the now-infamous “torment nexus” tweet.14

And of course, there’s Elon Musk and his frequent citation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the novel he claims as one of his earliest and most profound influences. In a profile of Musk for the New Yorker, Jill Lepore quotes Musk as saying, “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” As Lepore drily observes, that is manifestly not what Douglas Adams’s novel is about. It is, she says—noting that Adams wrote the novel on a typewriter with an “End Apartheid” sticker—“among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism.” She quotes a rather pointed passage from the novel:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

One passage a friend reminded me of recently is even more on the nose. In Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982), Arthur Dent et al encounter a spaceship hosting a party that has been going on for four generations, such that the current partiers are the great-grandchildren of the original hosts and guests. The planet the ship orbits has been laid waste over the years by the party ship’s frequent plundering of the surface’s resources and raids on snack and booze stockpiles. As a SF allegory for what our current tech overlords are doing, it seems veritably prophetic—but of course, Adams’s scenario does what all good SF does, which is to say: it defamiliarizes something that is by no means new.

In this respect, the determination to turn science fiction into science fact reverses the most basic imaginative trajectory of SF: not using the past and present as source material for imagined futures but using imagined futures as source material for what we need to do in the present. Those imagined futures are often treated as a fait accompli: as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism (2026), the Silicon Valley strategy for luring in investors is by being always proleptic. Musk in particular has always managed to inflate his valuations by glossing over the (often intractable) challenges facing present technologies with the promise of futures he frames as inevitable; his “logic of financial fabulism treat[s] imagined futures as already under way.” They quote Phil Jones’s more lacerating characterization: “Like the Soviet state dangling the promise of a radiant future in front of its tired citizens, Musk’s success is sustained by predictions of a technological sublime that’s only ever another decade away.”

It might seem counter-intuitive to charge Musk et al with a lack of imagination, given that these imagined futures can often seem precisely like the most grandiose of SF flights: telepathy via computer chips embedded in the brain, thriving colonies on Mars and the Moon and beyond, the exponential growth of AI into a superintelligence that will solve all humanities conflicts and crises, the merging of our consciousness with that AI and the subsequent expansion of humanity into all corners of the galaxy. Yet all of this is derivative, the dreams of often decades-old SF—none of which is meant to be understood literally.

As Adam Becker notes in More Everything Forever, the blithe assumption of certain future inevitabilities—such as Ray Kurzweil’s technological Singularity and the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence—invariably papers over the general imaginative impoverishment of these visions. “The likelihood of these futures is small,” he writes, “not just because they’re scientifically implausible but also because they’re rather specific, depending on so many large and small things falling into place, things that we can’t know about, like the individual desires and cultural norms of future humans” (17). Becker compares the assumption of technological inevitability to “playing a video game like Civilization, where there is a technology tree laid out in front of them clearly, and humanity (or indeed any intelligent species) is just working its way through that preexisting tree” (87).

The lack of nuanced thinking reflects a resistance or perhaps inability to engage with the fundamental messiness of human thought and behaviour. It is, to repurpose Sir Terry’s ethereal villains, Auditor thinking—everything valid must be quantifiable, and everything unquantifiable is mere noise. It is thus unsurprising that the broader metaphorical and allegorical dimensions of SF tend to be lost on our tech overlords, as they see them not as works of imagination to be explored but blueprints to be followed. By the same token, it is tempting to see the catastrophe that social media has become as the inevitable15 outcome of seeing sociality, community, and people’s behaviour more generally as quantifiable. As Greg Lavalee writes in Slate of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, you can’t code your way out of a culture problem. Or as Becker puts it, “Applying more intelligence and technology to these problems won’t solve them; they’re fundamentally political” (175).

It is unsurprising that empathy is anathema to Musk et al. Empathy, after all, necessarily proceeds from metaphor: we can never experience somebody else’s pain, we can only make analogies to our own experience and try to imaginatively put ourselves in their place. Empathy, in this respect, part of the resource of fantasy. Aside from the fact that an excess of empathy would be a roadblock to the accumulation of billions of dollars, it also necessitates a concern for the present moment, in which the dreams of the Singularity and Artificial General Intelligence are driving the consumption of resources toward critical mass. Not coincidentally, our SF has shifted focus in ways that are almost certainly also anathema to the broligarchy, leaving off the fantasy of resources to more discomforting and dystopian preoccupations with scarcity and our increasingly precarious climate.

Catesby is curious as to why you’re doing the thing you’re doing the way you’re doing it.

REFERENCES

Becker, Adam. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Basic Books, 2025.

Becker, Adam and Jennifer Ouellette. “Silicon Valley Billionaires Literally Want the Impossible.” Ars Technica. 25 April 2025. https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tor, 1991 [1985].

Dillard, Annie. Living By Fiction. Harper & Row, 1982.

Jones, Phil. “Silicon Telepathy.” London Review of Books: LRB Blog. 25 June 2021. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/june/silicon-telepathy.

Lepore, Jill. “The X-Man: How Elon Musk became a superhero and then a supervillain.” The New Yorker. 11 September 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-book-review.

Macdonald, Graeme. “Improbability Drives: The Energy of Sf.” Paradoxa 26 (2014): 111-144.

Pratchett, Terry. Thief of Time. Corgi, 2001.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994.

Slobodian, Quinn and Ben Tarnoff. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Narrated by Adam Grupper. Audible, 2026. Audiobook.

NOTES

10

For the sake of clarity, the planet Jupiter has an approximate mass of 1.89x10²⁷ kg. That’s 318 times the mass of the Earth, and 2.5 times larger than all the other planets in the solar system combined.

Five years ago, I found myself revisiting two iconic galactic empires. The release of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune was imminent, and between the trailers and advance buzz it seemed possible that we might get an actually good cinematic realization of what had often been thought an unfilmable novel.1 It seemed an opportune moment to dust off my copy and give it a reread.

Serendipitously, at around the same time AppleTV had just started airing Foundation, its television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic novel. Given that it starred Jared Harris and Lee Pace, two actors I’m happy to watch in anything, I binged the first four or five episodes.

Now is when I should admit that neither Dune nor Foundation are novels that have ever done much for me. There are many reasons why this is the case, but I think a big one is that I didn’t get around to reading either until I was in my early thirties. Both are works that would have benefitted from discovering them in my teens, Dune especially—it was one of those novels that has a great tendency to get its hooks into younger readers and rewire parts of the brain (my personal brain chemistry was transformed by The Lord of the Rings, but this sort of thing can happen repeatedly).2 Reading it with a more seasoned sensibility made me more appreciative of its truly brilliant world-building, which unfortunately wasn’t enough to balance out its lugubrious prose and hamfisted storytelling. Honestly, a judicious edit that just excised all the parts where characters narrated stuff that we already knew to themselves would trim that novel by a third.

Foundation, by contrast, was just … okay. I was in the position while reading it of constantly historicizing, reminding myself it was written in the 1940s and that what appears today as fairly weak tea was profoundly inventive for its moment and influential on reams of SF that followed. And were I to teach Foundation in a class on SF, I could deliver a great lecture that would articulate its innovation and influence … but I’d probably also have to admit that I found the overall story meh, and its foundational3 conception of “psychohistory” a relic of Spenglerian fantasy.

But all that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed both parts of Villeneuve’s Dune (all the lingering hero-silhouettes of Timothée Shamalama notwithstanding). I also sort of liked the AppleTV Foundation, though that probably had a lot to do with the fact that it didn’t exactly hew to the source material with great fidelity. I watched a few more episodes but didn’t follow it past season one.

Rereading Dune and watching Foundation five years ago crystalized a thought that had been lurking for quite some time. Namely, I was struck by the fact that, for all the fantastic leaps of imagination that define SF as a genre—for all the impossible technologies that animate such interstellar sagas—the one element that really strained my credulity and made the entire speculative framework of both stories less tenable had nothing to do with science or technology. Never mind faster-than-light travel, or gargantuan sandworms or any of the other typical bits of science fictional furniture; what I just couldn’t believe was a circumstance in which human beings could attain a unitary, stable planetary government, never mind the aeons-old galactic empires that comprise the settings of Hebert and Asimov’s iconic novels.

1. Poop potatoes as novum

A concept integral to SF literary theory is the novum, which was introduced by Darko Suvin in his pioneering study The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979).4 Literally meaning “new thing,” the novum as theorized by Suvin is a defining element of SF: the introduction of an imagined scientific or technological break with our primary reality that facilitates the creation of a speculative futurity. Or more plainly, the novum is the “science” of science fiction, and however likely or possible its eventuality seems, it still entails the introduction of technology or science not presently available to us, which takes us out of the present moment and defines a fictional reality.

Hence, however much the figuration of a singular planetary government is something I find implausible, it isn’t by Suvin’s definition a novum, as it entails a social and political transformation and not a scientific or technological one. The latter, argues Suvin, is what defines SF as a genre of “cognitive estrangement,” facilitating a fictional reality in which given technological leaps or breakages—whether faster-than-light travel, superintelligent AI, planetary exploration, cyborgs and robots, reanimating bodies stitched together from corpses, etc.—provide an imaginative armature to explore possible futures or alternate realities. The nature of the novum, in terms of its seeming likelihood or believability, is frequently a key element: even a casual familiarity with the vicissitudes of SF likely makes one aware of the distinction between “hard” and “soft” SF, or, in less problematic framing, extrapolative and speculative. The former refers to SF grounded in more rigorous science, from which it putatively arrives at a plausible novum. A novel (and subsequent film) like Andy Weir’s The Martian is a useful example of extrapolative SF: set in the relatively modest framework of a mission to Mars, there is little in the novel that seems implausible. Indeed, the greater part of the novel’s appeal is precisely its plausibility, with botanist Mark Watney, stranded on Mars, determined to “science the shit” out of his situation to survive.

Still, however much the technology seems familiar or consonant with our present reality, or however much Elon Musk keeps promising a mission to Mars is imminent, the story nevertheless makes a handful of necessary imaginative leaps to get us to the point where Mark Watney could be stranded and growing poop potatoes on the Red Planet.5

Though one of the great pleasures of both the novel and the film lies in Watney’s systematic problem-solving, the science functions as a mechanism for exploring humanistic concerns. In the end, Watney reflects on how his journey is reflective of the human instinct to help one another; more broadly, the novum of a spacecraft capable of executing a manned mission to Mars—replete with rotating sections to induce gravity—and all of the concomitant innovation and materiel needed for both the mission and the rescue are facilitated by tenuous political negotiations on Earth. The corollary dramas to Watney’s solitary slog on Mars are the fraught efforts of ground control to think of a way to get him back, and the parallel agonies of the crew on the spacecraft Ares III who accidentally left him behind.

To parse it another way: a largely unspoken dimension of the novel is the social and political context of an imagined 2035, in which NASA, in wary partnership with the Chinese, is able to develop an ongoing exploration of Mars over multiple missions. The ultimate rescue of Watney hinges in part on that political question, and on circumstances in which both individuals and political entities answer to their better angels. On a broader spectrum of SF, ranging from utopian to dystopian futurities, The Martian lands quite firmly at the utopian end.

2. The Galactic Novum

Upon deeper consideration, it perhaps makes sense to assume that for humanity to become a spacefaring species, it would require a degree of global cooperation that has largely been elusive during the relatively recent history in which we could speak of a “global” world. Barring the invention or discovery of a technology that makes escaping our gravity well cheap and easy,6 the sheer expense of space travel at scale seems best accomplished as a collaboration of nations.7 Still, it is striking that SF imagining an interplanetary future tends to simply assume a one-world Earth government as a default setting. At the most utopian end of the scale is the sort of handwaving on which Gene Rodenberry premised Star Trek, where the realization that we’re not alone in the universe serves to magically resolve our most elemental conflicts and unite humanity.8 But even in less-than-utopian futurities, in which people are still greedy and corrupt and venal, spacefaring humanity9 almost invariably lifts off from an Earth with a singular world government.10

My scepticism about the stable, long-standing galactic empires of Dune and Foundation is not hard to fathom when you consider I was rereading the former and watching the latter in fall of 2021. We were at that moment just tentatively emerging from the covid pandemic. The early optimism of the lockdown—in which health-care workers were applauded on their walk to work, there was a sense that perhaps there’d be a large-scale re-evaluation of the nature or work and labour, and a whole lot of us got into baking sourdough—had long since curdled into resentment and an even more polarized political environment in which anti-science sentiment and paranoia had ratcheted up by a magnitude.

This context was not, to put it mildly, one that facilitated utopian thought, or really even allowed tacit utopian assumptions to pass uncritically. At least not for me; I suppose your mileage may vary.

It is true that both Dune and Foundation are about the collapse of galaxy-spanning empires, but those collapses come after millennia of relative stability—the Imperium of Dune maintained through the balance between the Imperial Household, the Spacing Guild, and the Landsraad, the Game of Thrones-esque assembly of squabbling noble houses;11 and the galactic empire of Foundation just sort of tacitly existing (until it doesn’t).12 The assumption, more clearly laid out in Dune and the television adaptation of Foundation, is that all the planets comprising the empires have unified planetary governments either federated with or subject to imperial rule. To cite two of the other most obvious examples, the same dynamic is present in Star Trek, with the Federation versus the respective empires of the Klingons and Romulans (and, later, the Cardassians), as well as in Star Wars with the Galactic Republic, comprised of federated planetary governments, which gives way to the Empire.13 Even a more politically nuanced series like The Expanse—both the novels and the TV show—features an Earth and Mars that are each single-government.

The Expanse is useful here because it places the seat of Earth’s government in the United Nations. I’ve always wondered if this was a bit of a troll on the part of authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (who pseudonymously comprise James S.A. Corey), given the general antipathy the U.N. tends to receive across the political spectrum—either castigated for being a feckless paper tiger, or else accorded nefarious conspiratorial powers and believed to be determined to impose tyrannical one-world government. As somebody who wrote his doctoral dissertation on conspiracy theory and paranoia, I spent a lot of time immersed in the myriad fever dreams imagining the various ways in which the U.N. would imminently be sending its black helicopters and shock troops to oppress freedom-loving people everywhere.14 Those of us who’d love to have a more effective global organization policing rogue states and promoting democracy wish the U.N. had even a fraction of the power attributed to it by the tinfoil-hat set; but the frustration of those amenable to such a scenario are just the mirror image of those who loathe it, insofar as that very polarized set of perspectives is itself reflective of how implausible a planetary government for eight billion people is.

The point here is that even during its moments of highest status and esteem, the U.N. presided over a world implacably split between American and Soviet spheres of influence. It’s perhaps a bit ironic, in hindsight, to note that the bipolar world of the Cold War was, at least numerically, the closest we’ve ever been to a unified world. Then it was just two factions; the almost four decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall have charted an ever-increasing fracture of world powers, with the Trump era accelerating the process. I noted in a previous essay, with my tongue only partially in my cheek, that the tripolar world Trump seems to favour—with American, Russian, and Chinese spheres of influence—eerily resembles Orwell’s division of the world into Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in 1984. In truth, however, we’re entering a moment of history far more fractured than that.

3. I didn’t really have a specific argument to make, so here’s some musing by way of conclusion

I find myself mulling two possibilities here: one, that one-world government is a default setting for much spacefaring SF because it is narratively convenient. If the story’s concern is with exploring the final frontier or engaging in galactic war with fearsome aliens or terraforming new worlds for human settlement, it’s easier to not have complications like intercontinental strife on the home planet.

Two, the thought avenues I’ve taken here have me wondering if this default setting isn’t perhaps a sort of mild version of Fermi’s Paradox, which asks how is it that, given the vastness of the universe with billions, if not trillions of inhabitable worlds, we so far seem to be the only intelligent life? Doesn’t it seem mathematically impossible for us to be all alone? And if so, where is everybody else? Why hasn’t contact been made?

One of the possible answers to the question is the rather dystopian notion that intelligent life has a bad tendency to destroy itself;15 if we grant that as a premise, there’s a reasonably good chance that very few planets with species akin to humans ever make it to the point of setting out for the stars. But as I’ve gestured at above, on a basic, pragmatic level it seems unlikely that humanity could achieve the dream of space travel at scale without some sort of global initiative or cooperation.

It stands to reason, then, that the planetary, one-world governments of so much spacefaring SF reflect an intuition of this necessity, even if it’s never really articulated in such terms—less a utopian gesture, perhaps, than an unconscious acknowledgment.

Sadly, I just don’t see that as a possibility with the world as it is.

For our requisite cats, here are Gloucester and Catesby in their particular imperium, with Catesby as the seat of power and Gloucester watching the skies for alien incursions.

NOTES

On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots from his pistol and mortally wounded Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago. Zangara was short and had to stand on a chair to get his shot; the chair wobbled, and he missed his more likely target, the man standing next to Cermak—President Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What if the chair hadn’t wobbled? What if he’d managed to kill FDR? What if the New Deal didn’t happen, the U.S. didn’t emerge from the Depression, and a weaker president didn’t step up to face the threat of the Axis powers?

Those what ifs are the premise of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which envisions an alternate reality in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War. The subgenre of alternate history by its very nature explores interesting thought experiments; but it also proposes the possibility of a parallel reality in which these events did happen.1 Whether a successful assassination of FDR would have played out as Dick envisioned is debatable, but it also leaves us with the spectre of a reality in which everything would be different, perhaps catastrophically so, because of a chair that didn’t wobble.

A fairly common refrain these days is for people to quip that we’re obviously living in the darkest timeline, an expression that wasn’t coined by a certain episode of Community, but which was certainly popularized by it. In the episode in question—“Remedial Chaos Theory,” season three, episode four—Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) proposes rolling a die to determine who should go downstairs to collect the pizza being delivered. Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), alarmed, says “Just so you know, Jeff, you are now creating six different timelines.” Jeff dismisses Abed’s concern and rolls the die … and the episode then proceeds to play out six different scenarios in which the events are determined by which member of the group goes to get the pizza.

I think about this episode a lot—both because it’s exemplary of Community’s manic and meta storytelling, and because the conceit of the darkest timeline (which recurs in later episodes) is one that has become common in our present moment. More than that: we’ve been subjected to a critical mass of multiverse stories in the past ten years or so. Most prominent perhaps have been a clutch of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the animated Spider-Verse films, but there’s also the most excellent Oscar winning Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), the AppleTV series Dark Matter, and the DC Cinematic Universe’s multiversal foray The Flash (2023) (as well as their television series The Flash and Arrow and Supergirl—which all become rather byzantine in their multiversal crossovers).

And that’s not getting into all the SF literature exploring the topic. Sir Terry Pratchett himself co-authored as series of novels with Stephen Baxter, starting with The Long Earth, that imagine a possibly infinite series of alternate earths. I recently posted a short(ish) essay on the fiction of M.R. Carey; three of his most recent novels similarly envision an infinite number of possible earths, which different iterations of humanity can step between, giving rise to a vast multidimensional empire called the Pandominion.

All of which leads me to ask: What’s with all the multiverses?2

Let’s start with some basic definitions. The theory of the multiverse proceeds from the premise that all possible eventualities play themselves out in parallel realities. There is actual science to this concept, though almost entirely speculative; unsurprisingly, I’m more interested in the ways the idea has manifested in literature and popular culture—from rom-com fare like the Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors (1998) to the recurrent Mirror Universe conceit in Star Trek, to the proliferation of multiversal storylines in comic books.

Basically, alterative realities, alternate timelines, possible worlds, gardens of forking paths … all of these proceed from the burning question what if? What if I’d turned left instead of right on that morning I met my future spouse, what if I’d followed my desire to become a lion tamer instead of a chartered accountant, what if … everything was different, or better, or worse. It makes for a compelling narrative device, as well as a treasure trove of narrative possibilities—meaning that, for media and formats with an insatiable need for content, like comic books and franchise movies, opening up multiple worlds becomes an attractive prospect.

Which brings me to three related arguments I want to make in answering my question. What’s with all the multiverses?

1. Well, let’s start with the most obvious thing: there’s profit to be had. As corporate juggernauts like Disney get bigger and bigger, needing more and more content, every property they own gets wrung to squeeze out more stuff.

2. One clue to the appeal of multiverses lies in the popularity of the “darkest timeline” refrain. Profound dissatisfaction with the world as it is, nostalgia for better times, anxiety over current events—these factors make the wish fulfilment dimension of the multiverse compelling. If we’re in the darkest timeline, that perhaps inspires wistful hope of a better reality and the prospect of escape—even if only in our minds.

3. Finally, what I really want to examine here is the way in which the multiverse, as both metaphor and narrative conceit, offers an ironic and almost certainly inadvertent critique of the very culture industry that makes the multiverse an attractive profit-generating machine.

But first: a little background. Though I’m considering the recent proliferation of multiverses in movies and TV, I don’t mean to suggest that multiverses are a recent phenomenon—indeed, the fact that a high proportion of these stories are cinema and television based on comic books is reflective of how comics have long used this particular convention.

And though I’m at least fifteen types of geek, comic books were never really my thing.3 So I’d like to welcome my friend and colleague Andrew Loman, a fellow professor of English and fellow American Lit scholar (of the 19^thC variety), whose courses in comics and graphic novels are always in great demand among our students.4

Andrew’s Two Cents

So, multiverses!

Was Leibniz, when he claimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the first to postulate a multiverse? Or was that Henry James, whose narrator in “The Jolly Corner” encounters the spirit of the Trumpian man he might have become if he hadn’t left New York?

Permit me – to punt on that. The first comics multiverse that I know of is the one that DC created in 1961 when Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino wrote “The Flash of Two Worlds.” In that adventure, the Silver-Age Flash, Barry Allen, blunders through a dimensional barrier and finds himself in the world of his comic-book inspiration, the Golden-Age Flash, Jay Garrick. This story inaugurated Earth-1 and Earth-2, and eventually led to all the other DC Earths: Earth-Three, Earth-Prime, Eartha Kitt. Talk about new frontiers.

But before there was a superhero multiverse, there was a shared superhero universe. In Action Comics #1, Superman is a lone man in a leotard. In Detective Comics #27, the Batman is the only crusader in town with a cape. These early comic books were anthologies, with a half dozen or so strips in each. But each strip was discrete, with its own protagonist, its own sub-genre, and its own visual style. In some special-occasion comics, like the ones celebrating the New York World’s Fair of 1940, superheroes might appear together on the cover, but in the strips inside they’d still fight crime in splendid isolation. There were in effect multiple World’s Fairs, each threatened by a separate megalomaniac and each saved by a different man in tights. These anthology comics were implicit multiverses, separate worlds with no sense that others existed only pages away.

The first substantial shared superhero universe appeared in All-Star Comics #3, in 1940, when a group of second-string superheroes gathered in a hotel room to tell each other stories about their various escapades. The Flash told a story about sunken treasure; Hawkman told a story about a deranged inventor lurking in the crater of Krakatoa; and so on. This was the inaugural meeting of the so-called Justice Society of America. The story’s narrative structure was what German literary critics call a Rahmenerzahlung – literally, a frame narrative, in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron or the Vetala Panchavimshati. When I revisit this issue of All-Star Comics, what jumps out at me is how hard it seems to have been to conceive of these characters as co-existing in one world. For good reason. One of the superheroes was the Atom, who was 5 feet tall, wore a cape and a thong, and could throw a punch.

Another was the Spectre, the spirit of a dead policeman imbued by God with unlimited power to wreak divine vengeance on malefactors. In his very first adventure, the Spectre caused the skin of a ne’er-do-well to shrink until he died in agony. But the Atom could throw a punch! It’s the original Hawkeye-versus-Thor dilemma: for the love of God, give the man some trick arrows. All-Star Comics finessed this problem. In subsequent so-called team-ups, the members of the Justice Society would collectively discover a multi-faceted crisis, and then they’d each go to address the individual facets independently, uniting only at the end to crow that they’d thwarted the schemes of let’s say Per Degaton yet again. It took a long time before writers could conceive of the Justice Society of America as a crime-fighting team – which is to say, could conceive of a way to reconcile all the different subgenres with their distinct, even incompatible chronotopes.

What I’m arguing, in short, is that the superhero team-up is the original multiverse – or rather, that the shared universe is a collapsed multiverse. We’re just so habituated to superhero teams that we can’t see them that way: we accept the shared universe, despite its generic and often logical incoherence. A hint of this multiversality is visible in the very first panel of All-Star Comics #3: the comic-relief character Johnny Thunder, brooding about his exclusion from the Justice Society meeting, sees superhero comics on racks at a newsstand, all featuring members of the team. What a twist – or, as narratologists would say, what a metalepsis.

The motives behind All-Star Comics were largely monetary. Those superheroes weren’t popular enough to sustain a title of their own – but maybe, the reasoning went, they could sustain a title together. But with the major comics publishers, money prominently informs every decision, so that’s only a critical insight to the extent that people might be tempted to forget it – to miss the game behind the game.

The motives behind “The Flash of Two Worlds” were likewise, I presume, cash-driven: why leave all those Lycra-clad commodities on the shelf? But what the multiverse also permitted was a substantial expansion of possible narratives, on the theme-and-variations model. The Flash of Earth-Three could be divorced from Iris West: you could spin a story out of that. The Flash of Earth-Four could be a gibbon. The Flash of Earth-Five could have wieners for fingers. And since comics are published monthly, and deadlines never stop looming, a model involving a great expansion of narrative possibilities and minimal creativity is more valuable than gold.

Back to Me!

Thank you, Andrew. Now, back to your alternate timeline.

Two key motivations are significant here: one, the need for content; two, fan service. As Andrew suggests, the first multiversal-adjacent storylines in comics were crossovers in which different individual superheroes teamed up. This narrative gambit opened up a host of story possibilities and also served to delight readers who got to see how Batman and Wonder Woman might work together, or what kind of personality conflicts might emerge in various scenarios. This of course was the MCU’s long game, setting up The Avengers (2012) five films earlier in the post-credits scene in Iron Man (2008). The DCEU tried to follow suit with a series of films culminating in Justice League.

But it gets interesting—even as the films arguably get worse—when the crossovers aren’t different titles featuring a variety of in-universe characters, but different timelines and realities.

And different franchises.

Because of course we’ve seen variations on most of the big superheroes: Superman has been portrayed by nearly twenty different actors at various points; Batman has had versions played by Adam West, Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and Robert Pattison. In just twenty-five years, Spider-Man has been rebooted three times for three films apiece (with yet another installment coming out later this year) featuring Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland. It was perhaps inevitable that, as corporate media merged, we’d see some of these different iterations thrown together.

One significant way we know multiversal superhero stories have become ubiquitous is by just how self-reflexive and meta a lot of the more recent offerings have been. I’m thinking of course of Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), which takes the Deadpool franchise’s signature winking fourth-wall breaking and cranks it up to eleven. Not only does it gleefully collapse a whole bunch of Marvel and Sony franchises into its manic stew—from the X-Men generally, but also Elektra, The Fantastic Four, and Blade—but also makes snarky comments about the byzantine corporate mergers that now legally permitted such intellectual properties to collide.

As good a starting point as any is considering Spider Man: No Way Home (2021) as representative of this most recent trend of the multiverse conceit being used to collapse franchises into each other. In the third Tom Holland Spider Man outing (not counting his forays with the Avengers), Peter Parker, having been outed as Spider Man at the end of Spider Man: Far from Home (2019) approaches Doctor Strange (Bennedict Cumberbatch), asking the sorcerer5 to perform a spell that would make everybody forget his secret identity. TL;DR: Peter interrupts the spell while it’s in process and inadvertently opens a rupture between alternate realities. He realizes something’s wrong when he finds himself doing battle with Doctor Octopus, as played by Alfred Molina in Spider-Man 2 (2004), the second of the Toby Maguire Spideys. Soon, the main villains from the Maguire films and the three Andrew Garfield iterations are loose in Tom Holland’s reality.

I will confess, of all the superhero multiverse movies, I enjoyed No Way Home the most, which is down to the charm of having Holland, Garfield, and Maguire teaming up.6 Such, indeed, is a huge part of the movie’s appeal, and certainly what the studio was aiming for: which is to say, fan service. As Andrew notes, superhero crossovers were a means to sell comic books, but they were (and are) effective because they’re a gift to avid readers, a reward for being an avid reader. However cynical a ploy such gestures might be, they carry emotional weight7 for anybody who has been previously invested in the characters and the stories.8

But the crossover of the MCU Spider Man with previous iterations of the franchise is also notable for what it represents: namely, the cinematic expression of the Blob-like corporate mergers and acquisitions that have turned entities like Disney into enormous juggernauts. As Deadpool repeatedly meta-jokes, all these multiversal crossovers are now possible because of such byzantine corporate machinations. As these entities grow larger and throw previously firewalled IP into the same pot, it’s not just possible for such franchise crossovers, but inevitable, as the demand for content at all costs becomes increasingly strident.

Disney followed Spider Man: No Way Home with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). If No Way Home had its charms, Multiverse of Madness was a chaotic hot mess—though I suppose the argument could be made that that’s just form following content, as the film follows Doctor Strange as he steps through a dizzying number of alternate earths and encounters myriad versions of both himself and the other characters populating the MCU. The climactic moment of these encounters comes when he’s apprehended in yet another alternate universe and brought before the Illuminati—that reality’s iteration of the Avengers, which features variations on MCU characters, like Hayley Atwell as “Captain Carter,” a British Captain America; Lashana Lynch, who previously appeared as Maria Rambeau in Captain Marvel (2019), but now playing the role of Captain Marvel; Dr. Strange’s erstwhile rival sorcerer Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor); and there are also Marvel comic book heroes who have heretofore not appeared in the MCU, such as a version of Reed Richards from The Fantastic Four, played by John Krazinski, and Black Bolt (Anson Mount). All of which is capped by what I have to imagine the filmmakers and producers intended to be the cherry on this particular cake of fan service, when this assemblage of alternate reality superheroes is completed by the arrival of Patrick Stewart as Professor X.

I won’t get into the weeds of the various ways in which this scene seeks to excite fans, other than to note it replicates the logic of No Way Home and ratchets it way up. So does Deadpool & Wolverine, albeit more coherently (though not less chaotically). Part of the greater success of the latter film lies in its more focused fan service: where Multiverse of Madness is confused and scattershot in its proliferation of properties, the unifying element of Deadpool & Wolverine is the bromance between its titular9 characters, itself a fictional parallel to the equally fictional antagonism of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as performed over social media for years prior to the film’s release.

Not to be left out of the multiversal madness, the DCEU made its first cinematic foray10 with the film The Flash. Though the movie landed with a thud, both a critical failure and a box office flop, it’s actually quite useful for our purposes here. In seeking to out-multiverse its MCU competition, its comically over-the-top11 climax ends up offering a fairly definitive answer to my titular question.

First, the basics, for those of you fortunate enough not to have lost one hundred and forty-four minutes of your life watching it. Barry Allen, aka The Flash (Ezra Miller)—who you might recall from such performances as his previous appearances in the Snyderverse—inadvertently disrupts his primary timeline and finds himself in an alternate reality. How and why is unimportant—the reasons that lead our various heroes in multiversal narratives to step between timelines tend to be MacGuffinish, as the real hero of these stories is the multiverse itself. Barry finds a hapless, non-superpowered version of himself in this other timeline. Desperate to set things aright, he has the bright idea to seek out Bruce Wayne. But rather than finding the Ben Affleck iteration from the Snyderverse, he stumbles upon … Michael Keaton. Yes, Michael Keaton, reprising his role from Tim Burton’s game changing 1989 Batman. Further, in thinking to add Superman to their cohort, they instead find Supergirl, played here by Sasha Callie.

Given the general plot’s incoherence, I won’t attempt a precis here other than to note it involves doing battle with General Zod from Man of Steel (2013), again played by Michael Shannon with the sort of tight-jawed stoicism of a true actor enduring a role by contemplating the addition it will put on his house. Suffice to say, we arrive at the climactic point in which the Flash’s timeline-jumping has created a potentially catastrophic cascade in which all possible realities are beginning to collapse into each other.

The very extended sequence looks as if the filmmakers watched the Illuminati scenes in Multiverse of Madness and said “Hold our beer.” As the realities collide, we are treated to an exhausting history of DC superheroes in film and television, from George Reeves as Superman in the 1950s to Christopher Reeve in the 70s to Henry Caville’s Man of Steel, to the never-actually-made version starring Nicolas Cage. All of which appears within a really rather terribly CGI’d cataclysm of spheres representing different realities—but which honestly look vaguely like massive banks of TV screens—bursting through cosmic rifts and colliding in slow motion.12

The crisis culminating in The Flash is more or less the same as in Multiverse of Madness—namely, the conceit that, should there be too much futzing with the multiverse, the boundaries between realities will collapse and destroy the multiverse. I don’t know where this conceit originated, but it did appear in a seventh-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Parallels” 7.10), in which Worf (Michael Dorn) finds himself jumping between timelines (because of reasons). The episode’s climax finds hundreds of Enterprises blipping into existence as the boundaries between their realities fall, and Worf must find his way to his true place before everything collapses (spoiler: he does).

This conceit of an apocalyptic collapse of realities exemplifies something we might term, alternately, unconscious or inadvertent critique—that is, a trope within popular culture that highlights and criticizes the very conditions of its production. The Flash and Multiverse of Madness both warn of the possibly catastrophic effects of the dissolution of previous boundaries while also exemplifying cinematic endpoints of corporate consolidation. The films’ manifest terribleness functions ironically as a sort of meta-critique: the drive for ever-greater volumes of content on one hand and the concomitant need to stimulate fan fervour on the other is a recipe for the kind of thoughtless excess these movies end up spewing.

Or to put it another way, the multiverse is us. We’ve already collapsed those boundaries. Which, even more ironically, reveals the notion that we live in the “darkest timeline” as the wistful delusion it is. There is no distinction to be made between different eventualities when all have always already been collapsed into one great morass of inevitabilities.

Here is Bartleby, the Cat, as he appears in two different timelines: one in which he has not yet been fed and is beseeching you with starving eyes, and another in which he was fed ten minutes ago and is gaslighting you. Can you spot the difference?

NOTES

7

The climactic moment of Avengers: Endgame (2019) when Captain America (Chris Evans) is finally able to say “Avengers … assemble!” is a as profoundly an emotional cinematic moment as the MCU offers, and serves as a reward for anybody who had seen a critical mass of the movies since Iron Man. In a perfect world—or perhaps a not-so-dark timeline—that movie would have put a bow on the MCU and brought it to a satisfying conclusion. But then, there’s profit to be had.

Recently, while randomly scrolling stuff online, I stumbled across a bookmark alignment chart. Though I was never big into D&D,1 I love alignment charts and went through a phase several years back where I searched out charts of my favourite TV shows and which characters fell into which categories (I’m not sure, but this was quite probably a pandemic-era obsession).

This bookmark alignment chart is, to my mind, pretty much on the money. It also serves as further confirmation that I am, every day in every way, resolutely Chaotic Good.

I have had over the years any number of “proper bookmarks,” accurately designated here as the True Neutral of the page-marking realm. Many were gifts, some I purchased myself; in all cases they didn’t see much use. Couldn’t really say why; they’re just not my speed, and I never felt quite right with something that decorative stuck in the middle of my book, especially if they were thicker than your average piece of card stock, and really especially if they had tassels or dangly bits or other such embellishments.

I’m most comfortable with more random pieces of paper. For a time, I used 3x5 cards, which I always made a point of having handy in a desk drawer. These are particularly useful as bookmarks for academic books I’m using for research, as I can use them as a ruler for underlining key passages. Receipts are of course a common go-to for me; there are many books on my shelves with their original receipts still in them, which allows for little memory lane moments of reminding myself at which bookstore and on which date they were purchased. When I lived in Toronto and spent a lot of time on public transit, transfers made for great bookmarks; I still encounter those on occasion when opening a book I haven’t cracked in years.

Sometimes, the relation between a book and its bookmark is of greater personal historical significance. In July of 2011, I was in Toronto to visit my parents and go see U2 perform in the 360° Tour. That same week, A Dance with Dragons hit the bookstores. Borrowing my mom’s car, I drove to the nearest Indigo right when it opened, grabbed the fifth and—unbeknownst to me then—probably final novel of A Song of Ice and Fire. I then proceeded to sit out on my parents’ deck all day and ploughed through about half of it. That night I went to see U2 at the Rogers Centre and afterward used my ticket as the bookmark. I’ve left it there—a memory of a specific moment of confluence between two of my fandoms.

On reflection, my preferred bookmarks tend to be disposable, while at the same time always having the possibility of becoming permanently associated with a given book. When I was writing my recent Ides of March essay I retrieved from my campus office one of the copies of Julius Caesar2 I used in my MA Shakespeare class, and found the receipt from the Bob Miller Book Room (180 Bloor Street West—now sadly no longer bookselling), dated December 2, 1996, with the transaction processed at precisely 2pm. Like the U2 concert ticket and A Dance with Dragons, these two are now yoked. I have any number of books with such permanent bookmarks in my personal library, though they’re not ubiquitous—I never think about posterity when I buy a new book, and am usually inclined to toss a receipt or a bookstore’s free bookmark3 in the trash without a second thought. It’s always happenstance when I don’t and what was once scrap paper becomes a bit of documentary evidence speaking to the unique history of the book in question.

I suppose there’s something to be said here about the dialectical tension built into my personal habit of page-marking, my preference for disposable bookmarks versus the tendency for some of those pieces of paper to become not only not disposable, but to attain an archival aura. Without really thinking about it (until now), I’ve sort of re-enacted in the microcosm of my personal library the happenstantial story of texts and artifacts, some of which survive to become historical markers, most of which do not.

Or not. More likely, it’s just indicative of the way serendipity rules my life.

That being said, I have of late found my perfect bookmark. It’s an object I’ve always prized for the task, but until recently it was in vanishingly short supply. And it’s something with which my Canadian readers will be extremely familiar.

For my non-Canadian readers: one of the things that unites my country is an automotive, hardware, and retail store chain called Canadian Tire. It was founded in the 1920s and can be found almost everywhere. There are over 500 stores across Canada, and something like 90% of the people living here are within a fifteen-minute drive of a an outlet. Starting in 1958, it launched a loyalty program in which purchases earned back a small percentage4 of your pre-tax purchase in faux-cash scrip, featuring a moustachioed man wearing a tam o’ shanter, who goes by the name Sandy McTire.

Sadly, Canadian Tire cash was retired during the covid pandemic, replaced with a loyalty card … which is probably more efficient (especially for data mining), but lacks the charm of the old bills. Like many Canadian children, I obsessively collected it, mostly in denominations of 5¢ and 10¢. When I had a stack totalling twenty dollars—making me feel like Scrooge McDuck—I used it to buy a (small) hunting knife to take to the cottage.

Later in life, my trips to Canadian Tire grew further and farther between; but I discovered, on those occasions when I earned a few of Sandy McTire’s bills, that it makes the perfect bookmark. The size, the colour, and the texture of the paper—all crucial factors!—made me carefully hoard my few bills,5 saving them for books that were worthy of them.

Last summer I was visiting my parents and my Dad noticed that I had an old 10¢ Canadian Tire bill marking my place in the book I was reading. After I gave him something like the spiel I articulated above, he sat for a moment with a smile before getting up and walking to the antique desk in the living room. Opening one of its drawers, he brought out a stack of Canadian Tire money, which now sits in a drawer by the desk in my home office.

Though it feels like a profusion of wealth to rival Smaug’s hoard, I’m still pretty parsimonious in using them. To paraphrase Westley in The Princess Bride, there’s a shortage of perfect bookmarks in the world.

Catesby, taking a break from her reading. As you can see from her bookmark of choice, she’s a True Neutral.

NOTES

Since starting The Magical Humanist, one of the things I’ve wanted to write is a deep dive into the fiction of M.R. Carey. This essay is not that—this essay is, as my title suggests, a notes toward a longer, probably multi-part excursion. I’m not sure when or if that will happen, but having just recently read his most recent novel Outlaw Planet, I figured I’d write something shorter proselytizing for his novels. Hopefully this piques enough people’s interest that I create a demand for the longer essay.

M.R. Carey is one of those exceptionally smart and extremely prolific authors of whom I’m terribly jealous while also being profoundly grateful for. In addition to writing numerous comics for both DC and Marvel, he has also written twenty-one novels since 2006, which works out to one novel a year (plus one). Of these I have read eight, the most recent being Outlaw Planet, published just this year.

I’m going to speak of these eight and their thematic consonance, while stipulating my ignorance of the rest of his work. I’ll also stipulate that if these eight had been the only novels he’d written, that would still be hellishly impressive, considering their intelligence and craft. I’ll break my discussion down by the three series into which they fall: The Hungry Plague, a zombie apocalypse duology; the Rampart Trilogy, featuring a post-apocalyptic Britain in which all of nature wants to kill humans; and the Pandominion, which begins on an apocalypsing earth and expands out into an infinite multiverse.

1. The Hungry Plague

I came to Carey out of my interest in post-apocalyptic narratives. I first read The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), which is close to being the best zombie apocalypse novel I’ve encountered.1 It was made into a film in 2016 starring Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and Paddy Considine, which is a quite good and faithful adaptation. It is one of the first of the new generation of “fungal zombie” narratives, which shift the basis for the living dead plague from its vaguer origins2 to a more extrapolative version based in the cordyceps species of fungus, which is notorious for parasitically infecting insects like ants and taking control of their nervous systems. (The video game The Last of Us [2013] and its adaptation by HBO are perhaps the most well-known of this subgenre.)

What sets apart The Girl with All the Gifts and its companion novel The Boy on the Bridge (2017) is that they imagine the cordyceps plague not merely as a potential extinction-level event threatening to wipe out humanity, but as a possible evolutionary inflection point. The titular character of The Girl with All the Gifts, a preteen named Melanie, is imprisoned in a military base in the south of England. Outside the base’s walls, the hungry plague has reduced the UK (and, presumably, the world) to a post-apocalyptic archipelago of redoubts in which surviving humans cling to a semblance of order. Melanie, along with a handful of other children like her, is an anomaly: a “hungry” who retains all her intelligent faculties, but who under certain stimuli will go berserk and attempt to eat the non-infected.

The how and why of Melanie’s condition is something I won’t spoil here but will save for a future deep dive into Carey’s work. Suffice to say, the emergence of intelligent (or at least sentient) zombies is reflective of the genre’s own evolution—something I wrote about at some length with regard to 28 Years Later3 last year—away from the uniformly mindless hordes of undead. This shift is both narrative and thematic, making zombies something more than just the allegorical manifestation of whatever cultural anxiety we imagine will be the end of civilization. Instead, it introduces a discomforting suggestion: that zombies aren’t an extinction-level event per se but could possibly comprise the next stage in human evolution.

The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge aren’t Weird fiction, not precisely, but they share a few thematic threads with such New Weird novels as Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014)—most specifically, the possibility that the kind of human transformation that so horrifies H.P. Lovecraft in such stories as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” isn’t necessarily dystopian. While not necessarily utopian, it’s a decentring of the human that considers how we might reimagine our understanding of humanity and our relationship to the larger world.

2. The Rampart Trilogy

The Book of Koli (2020), The Trials of Koli (2020), and The Fall of Koli (2021) came out in such quick succession that it seemed obvious Carey had written all three as a single manuscript. Reading them reinforces this impression: The Book of Koli does the hard work of world-building and establishing our principal characters and the stakes of the story to follow. As such, it’s a bit of a slog, picking up momentum in its final hundred pages or so. From that point, the narrative carries you pretty effortlessly. Presumably, the three novels’ cumulative 1500 pages would be (a) prohibitively expensive to print, while (b) turning away enough prospective readers that that expense would not be justified. So, probably a wise decision, but my advice to anybody who picks up Book is to be patient and power through to at least the two-thirds mark. From there it’s easy sailing.

And well worth the effort, because Carey’s overarching conceit is so very cool. The titular Koli is a callow teenager on the cusp of true adulthood, living in a village called Mythen Rood, which is protected by a palisade. Protected from what, you ask? Well, everything. Set at an indeterminate point in a future England, the Rampart Trilogy imagines a world in which a critical mass of the natural world has become actively hostile to human life. We glean as the story progresses that this civilization-destroying apocalypse was self-inflicted: as environmental crises worsened, the various technological interventions that were intended to fix or at least ameliorate the worst of it backfired. Genetic modifications resulted in both flora and fauna developing lethal tendencies that then, not unpredictably, proceeded to wipe out huge swathes of the human population. Centuries later, humanity clings to life in a handful of fortified settlements.

Ironically, one of the key methods they have of survival are technological artifacts leftover from the before times. The novels never make clear precisely when civilization collapsed, but it was definitely at a point sometime in our current future: the technology that survives is far advanced from what we currently possess, but not so much that we can’t extrapolate from our present state. What few weapons remain are mostly sufficient, alongside bows and spears, to repel hostile plants and animals, marauding humans, as well as the occasional automated drones of the old world still carrying out search and destroy missions. In Mythen Rood, those individuals capable of wielding the old technology are called “Ramparts,” and Koli wishes nothing more than to be a Rampart. This fervent desire leads him to break into the armoury and steal one of the non-activated shiny things. After a lot of trial and error, he manages to turn it on; it turns out to be a Sony Dreamsleeve™, basically a terribly advanced iPod with an AI personality modelled after a Japanese popstar named Monono Aware.

When Koli reveals that he has activated the Dreamsleeve™, expecting to become a Rampart, he is instead exiled for thievery, and must navigate the deadly world without the palisade walls with only a perky chatbot for help.4

And if that seems like a lot of spoilers, not to worry—I’ve barely recounted the first novel to the halfway mark.

If The Hungry Plague introduces transhumanist themes by way of intelligent zombies, the Rampart Trilogy expands on those conceits by way of a quasi-sentient natural environment and the introduction of artificial intelligence that realizes some of the more outsized promises of AI’s present boosters. Monono, as Koli’s sole companion in exile, becomes something akin to a friend—though in the early stages it becomes clear she has very specific guardrails on her intelligence and capacity for growth. At one point however, necessity takes her into the crumbling remnants of the internet, which lives on in the decaying satellites still orbiting earth. There she manages to hack her guardrails, and she returns as something else entirely—still recognizably “Monono,” but with more knowledge, autonomy, and even wisdom—who may or may not be dangerous.

3. The Pandominion

The two novels comprising the Pandominion duology aren’t precisely post-apocalyptic, but they’re also not not post-apocalyptic, considering that that first part of Infinity Gate (2023) features the collapse of our reality’s global civilization. At the University of Lagos, scientist Dr. Hadiz Tambuwal labours away at her research while the world without implodes. She isn’t oblivious to the ongoing global catastrophe, but is working on a projected funded by a billionaire—one of the many ultra-rich who, suddenly realizing their vast fortunes are meaningless without a functioning civilization, throw millions of dollars at a host of hail Mary innovations in the hopes that one will be the silver bullet that saves the world.

Dr. Hadiz does not, in fact, save the world … though it is a near thing. What she does is stumble onto “step” technology, which allows her to step between parallel earths in an infinite multiverse. In so doing, she realizes, tragically too late, that access to an infinitude of alternate earths would have been the solution to the catastrophe. Given an infinite number5 of possible realities, only a small percentage of them would give rise to intelligent life. Many more—technically, given the nature of infinity, an infinite number—would be completely empty of people. Which means that, too late for it to make a difference, Dr. Hadiz solved scarcity.

Again, I’m being spoilery for just the initial part of the story. This is just the setup: what follows is an appropriately expansive story spanning numerous alternate earths as it becomes clear that those worlds that have discovered step technology (as opposed to such “sinkhole” worlds as our own) are all made to join a massive entity known as the Pandominion. All of these worlds have evolved intelligent life, but they’re not all human in the sense we understand the term. Rather, on these earths, there is invariably one dominant species that has evolved to attain intelligence and thus develop step capabilities. What species got to this point varies world to world, and so we encounter canine, feline, ursine, otters and rabbits, bison and beavers and numerous other mammalian species, and even some reptilian iterations. Primate-evolved sapiens, it turns out, are rather a small minority.

Carey’s world-building is quite exquisitely done and accomplished with much greater ease than the clunkier setup in The Book of Koli. The cast of characters is also appropriately voluminous (though mercifully not infinite), and features a large number of narrative threads that are admirably resolved by the end of Echo of Worlds. We get glimpses into the byzantine bureaucracy governing the Pandominion, the politics of managing hundreds of thousands of worlds, as well as some impressive technobabble explaining the science of not just step technology itself but the way in which it is managed.

There is also a space-marines dimension to the story that functions as an accomplished homage to such precursors as Starship Troopers (1959) and The Forever War (1974). Early on, in an alternate Lagos that closely resembles her own, where she has stepped to discreetly keep developing her research, Dr. Hadiz meets a self-described rogue named Essien Nkanika. In a bit of plot business I won’t spoil, Essien is captured by the Pandominion and given the choice of prison or joining the Cielo—the military force that polices its worlds. Choosing the latter, Essien is inducted and given all the cyborg upgrades and physical enhancements that are standard in this subgenre and he has his own narrative spur fighting and being a soldier before the plot brings him back into Dr. Hadiz’s orbit.

The principal conflict at the center of the overarching story comes somewhere before the halfway mark when the Pandominion comes into contact with a comparably large civilization of sentient machines. I’ll tread carefully here and save more detailed (and spoilery) discussion for a future M.R. Carey essay, and just say that the way Carey imagines a conflict between humanity (broadly defined) and an empire of AI6 is at once thoughtful and thought-provoking and resists many of the usual cliches of human vs. machine intelligence stories.

I’ll finish with a brief discussion of Outlaw Planet as a coda. I just recently read it, and quite enjoyed it, though I wasn’t sure what to make of it for its first hundred pages or so. Though it announces itself as a Pandominion novel in its prologue, it is not of a piece with Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds—and indeed, absent the specific Pandominion reference at the outset, I might not have connected those dots for some time. The clues are otherwise there, most specifically in the way in which the characters are all introduced by their species of origin. But unlike the planets of the Pandominion, which each feature a single dominant speciation, the world of Outlaw Planet is promiscuously diverse.

It is also, straightforwardly, a Western. Which is to say: leaving aside the fact that all of the people (or “selves” in the parlance of the novel) are furry human-adjacent versions of cats, dogs, wolves, bears, otters, foxes, and numerous other animals, Outlaw Planet is identifiably set in an antebellum American frontier in which all the place-names are different. The language and speech cadences also emulate the kind of loquacious drawl specific to the genre, a convention established in the opening paragraph’s introduction of the main character:

Dog-Bitch Bess is what they came to call her. You might say that’s a strange name to lay on someone, and I would not be inclined to disagree. A mite over-precise, at the very least. All dog-selves are either bulls or bitches so that ought to be a given. It’s as if you were to say that a plank of wood was made out of tree-wood, or that someone coming in out of a rainstorm was water-wet.

Somewhere around the third sentence, I couldn’t help but hear this being narrated by Sam Elliot.

I’m partial to Westerns, so this story-framing wasn’t unwelcome; it was however somewhat puzzling for a spell, as it initially felt more like parody than anything more pointed. Dog-Bitch Bess begins the story as Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, a young woman whose family’s fortune is ruined and so she takes herself off south and west to take a job as a schoolteacher. There she settles into a small town on the frontier and makes a living with her fellow-schoolteacher with whom she becomes secretly romantically involved. All while North and South start rattling sabres, ultimately going to war. When Bess’s lover is killed by a band of Northern raiders who sack their town, Bess sets off with revenge in her heart and becomes the notorious outlaw known as Dog-Bitch Bess.

Again, leaving aside the fact that all the characters are of different animal stock and the Union and Confederacy are called the Parity and the Echelon, this is effectively a paint-by-numbers Western with enough of a feminist and queer dimension to make it somewhat progressively revisionist. Where it gets interesting is in how it becomes a Pandominion novel, which begins with Bess’s acquisition of a piece of “Precursor” technology—a sentient gun that goes by the name Wakeful Slim, which has any number of helpful functions, from a razor-like beam to sonar and radar to an ability to link to the surviving satellites orbiting the planet and surveil the land for miles around. Also, it shoots an array of bullets it creates for itself, all while speaking to Bess in the sort of Sam Elliot drawl that pervades the novel’s prose.

The Precursors, you glean from early references, were a highly advanced civilization that predated the current faux-America. They appears in various folktales and myths, but more important are their artifacts. It’s interesting how Carey here recapitulates a key element of the Rampart Trilogy: leftover sentient technology that becomes the main character’s key advantage and only friend. It probably goes without saying that eventually we get the full backstory of the Precursors and Wakeful Slim’s origin story, as well as an explanation for why this world—seemingly alone in the Pandominion (which only appears in their myths)—has such a profusion of speciation. And because I’m not offering spoilers here, all I’ll say is that the revelations aren’t what I guessed, and everything is resolved in a very satisfying manner.

How’s everybody’s April going? Is it spring yet where you are?

Here’s Gloucester the Cat, whose expression tells you precisely what he thinks of the subzero weather we had in Newfoundland today.

NOTES

Gen. Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth, both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-war environments: one where you got 20 million people killed, and the other where you got 150 million people killed!

President Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war.

Gen. Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed! But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.

—Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Kubrick 1964)

Yesterday I found myself reading, by way of John Ganz’s Unpopular Front, a New Yorker article from 1995 about notorious U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay. LeMay, who made his bones as the architect of the devastating fire bombings of Japanese cities in WWII and went on to become the commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the 1950s, and then went on to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a post he held during the Cuban Missile Crisis—consistently advocated for the use of nuclear weapons in a preventative first strike against the Soviet Union. His conviction that a massive nuclear attack was not just desirable, but imperative, led to him being the model for the characters of both Colonel Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964).

More specifically, it’s Curtis LeMay who gave us the expression “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Ganz quotes from LeMay’s 1965 autobiography Mission with LeMay, in which the General at one point opines on the then-current war in Vietnam and how he thinks the U.S. could best win it decisively:

The military task confronting us is to make it so expensive for the North Vietnamese that they will stop their aggression against South Viet Nam and Laos. If we make it too expensive for them, they will stop. They don’t want to lose everything they have … My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to shape in their horns and stop that aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.

Ever since the advent of flight and its inevitable military adoption, there has existed the fantasy that wars could be won with air power alone. Going into the Second World War, a small group of American Air Force officers theorized that precision strategic bombing was the wave of the future. Indeed, they argued that insofar as war could be humane, precision bombing was the most bloodless means of deciding conflicts: by striking a handful of vital targets like power stations, railroad junctions, communications hubs, armament factories, and so on, you could swiftly and decisively end an enemy’s ability to prosecute war.

Or so the theory went. History has not exactly borne it out, but that has not stopped generation after generation from buying into the air power fantasy.

The bomber war over Europe is illustrative of this fallacy. The Americans went in believing they could incapacitate the Germans with precision strikes. Their secret weapon was the newly developed Norden bomb sight. It was heralded as a marvel of engineering that would take into account a huge range of variables—among other things, windspeed, forward velocity, air temperature and density, bomb size, even the earth’s rotation—which the bombardier would feed into the machine’s difference engine and, from twenty thousand feet up or more, plant a bomb neatly into a pickle barrel.1

Suffice to say, the Norden bomb sight did not live up to its outsized promise. The story of the early days of the bombing war was one of chronic error, with missions frustrated by cloud cover and poor navigation that often led to bombs being dropped on the wrong targets. Still, the Americans hewed to their determination to strike solely military targets. To that end, they flew their missions during daylight and suffered huge losses from the Luftwaffe. As the war went on and the Americans amassed an increasingly large bomber fleet, raids became more effective, but the imprecision of the attacks also became impossible to ignore. Though the aiming-points were always a military target, missions more often than not became de facto exercises in area bombing.

Conversely, the RAF never seriously attempted anything resembling precision bombing—partly because of the recognition that that sort of accuracy was always a canard, but mostly because of the man who commanded the British bomber force. Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris stands out as one of the most monomaniacal military commanders in history. From the start, he believed the whole concept of precision bombing was absurd and thought the American insistence on striking only military targets was both delusional and weak. Under Bomber Harris, the RAF strategy was simple: drop a critical mass of ordnance on population centres and kill, disrupt, and demoralize the Germans into surrender.

Though the American prewar bombing theorists, many of whom rose to command positions during the war, soon realized that air power alone could not win the war, Bomber Harris never let go of that conviction. It was a point of faith with him, and he steadfastly resisted any attempts to divert any of his planes to carry out targeted attacks with the Americans. As far as he was concerned, area bombing would bring the Germans to their knees. He had a list of German cities and towns that he worked through methodically. Many had little or no strategic value, other than that they contained Germans. Killing, de-housing, and terrorizing the general population would, he repeatedly asserted, break the German spirit and eventually cause the people to revolt against Hitler and the German high command. In his more euphemistic moments, Harris called his strategy “morale bombing” to emphasize what he meant ultimately to destroy.

What became apparent after the war was that the sustained campaign of bombing not only didn’t break the German spirit, but in fact had the opposite effect. The relentless attacks served to stiffen the German people’s spines. Which is something Bomber Harris should have at least considered as a possibility, given that he had evidence to that effect from Britain’s own experience during the Blitz. Indeed, this much was pointed out to Harris by Ira Eaker, the commander of the U.S. bomber force. One evening after the two men had eaten dinner together, Harris expounded at length on why the Americans should join the British in night-time area bombing. Eaker pointed out that that the Blitz had not broken the British spirit—why would he think it would break the Germans’? According to Eaker’s account, Harris dismissed the comparison, asserting that the Brits were made of sterner stuff; the Germans, by contrast, would surely crack.

It’s important to note that at the outset of the Luftwaffe bombing campaign—itself launched on the premise that it would break the British and soften them up for Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain—the British high command’s greatest fear was precisely that their people’s spirit would break, and civil society would collapse. The “keep calm and carry on” ethos that has become so identified with the British response to the Blitz was post-facto: the citizenry’s implacability, alongside the RAF fighter corps’ success in repelling the Germans, were two rare bright spots in Britain’s darkest hour. The British have always been justified in feeling proud of that stoicism; Harris’s assumption, which he was not alone in making—that this was somehow exceptional to the British—is exemplary of cultural chauvinism, national ego replicated in Harris’ personal arrogance and obstinance.

It was also exemplary of the sort of magical thinking that attaches to air power. Reading the New Yorker essay on Curtis LeMay, I was startled to learn just how extensively SAC had bombed North Korea during the Korean War:

At the outset of the Korean War, in 1950, LeMay had asked the Pentagon, as he said later, to “turn SAC loose with incendiaries” on North Korea; Truman’s advisers had rejected such a blitzkrieg of mass destruction. SAC was ultimately authorized to bomb urban and rural North Korea anyway, piecemeal, and carried out its assignment brutally, burning out cities and breaking big agricultural dams, scouring out entire valleys of peasant villages and rice paddies as far as twenty-seven miles downstream, spreading the agony across the years of war. More than two million North Korean civilians died in that campaign, a little-known toll comparable to civilian losses in Japan during the Second World War. “Over a period of three years or so,” LeMay remembered, “we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea …”

Here LeMay was basically replicating the strategy he’d employed in the final year of WWII against Japan. Having effectively wiped out the Japanese air force, he sent his flights of B-29 bombers at much lower altitudes than they were capable of and pummelled Tokyo with incendiaries, creating a firestorm that dwarfed those of Hamburg and Dresden and killing more people in one night of bombing than any other raid in the war. He then carried out identical attacks on dozens of other Japanese cities. By that point in the war, there was no pretence to precision bombing of military targets—LeMay was entirely of the Bomber Harris school of thought, which continued to inform his bellicosity on through the Cold War years.

This in spite of the fact that conventional bombing, even on an unthinkable scale, has never won a war. LeMay’s suggestion in 1965 that North Vietnam could be defeated by “bombing them back to the Stone Age” elides the fact that all the death and destruction SAC visited on North Korea did not bring victory, as indeed the war is technically still going on because there was no negotiated peace. Nor did his firebombing of Japan bring about a surrender; it was only the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally prompted Japan’s capitulation.

Wait, you might say—wasn’t that exactly an instance of bombing winning a war? Well, yes and no. Yes, those two bombs shocked Japan into surrender. But nuclear weapons are different in kind from conventional weapons. This much LeMay never seemed to grasp: he was among a small cadre of Americans eager to use nukes, especially in the early days of the Cold War when he perceived that the Soviet Union was vulnerable:

LeMay had no interest in dribbling out his forces on three disparate missions. The Soviets might need a month in 1954 to deliver their arsenal of about a hundred and fifty atomic bombs; his thousand and eight bomber crews, once deployed, could deliver as many as seven hundred and fifty bombs in a few hours. The SAC commander continued to believe obstinately that the most effective attack would be his “Sunday punch”: simultaneous assault from all sides with everything in the stockpile.

LeMay was constantly frustrated and annoyed by what he saw as presidential vacillation, first with Truman, then Eisenhower, and finally with Kennedy, whom he believed had “lost” the Cuban Missile Crisis, just as he later lamented that the United States had “lost” the Cold War. His vision for his “Sunday punch,” according to the notes of a subordinate party to his thinking, gave “The final impression … that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.” Even assuming the attack overwhelmed the Soviets, the key word in that estimation is “radiating”—missing from the attack plan is the acknowledgment that nuclear weapons are never an entirely one-way attack. They’re an assault on the world as much as a nation.

When Soviet missiles were initially discovered in Cuba, LeMay predictably urged Kennedy to immediately strike the sites with overwhelming force. It’s telling that, when queried by Kennedy what the Soviet response would be, LeMay “assured him there would be no reaction.” To which, according to Robert F. Kennedy’s account Thirteen Days, the President responded, “They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can’t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.”

Or, to use an expression I’ve been hearing a lot lately: LeMay seemed to forget that the Soviets also got a vote.

In case it wasn’t obvious, this essay is about Iran.

Several hours before I started writing, Donald Trump bleated out a threat on Truth Social that began with the declaration “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.”

Not long before I wrote this sentence, news broke that Trump has backed off his threat and will hold off for two weeks, ostensibly pending Iran’s willingness to re-open the Strait of Hormuz.

When I read that Truth Social bleat earlier today, I honestly didn’t know whether to roll my eyes or start stocking up dry goods. On one hand, it fit the escalatory pattern of the past month or so, in which Trump and his manchild SecDef Pete Hegseth have exhibited a one-dimensional grasp of militarism that only understands brute force as their perfect manifestation of manliness. “Death from above” is their pretension to godliness, and “bombing them back to the Stone Age” is the perfect cliché for them to imagine they’re visiting divine retribution.

On the other hand, I have to imagine Trump’s grasp of the magnitude of difference between conventional and nuclear ordnance is even more tenuous than Curtis LeMay’s. Who, I have to imagine, is looking up from Hell lamenting the fact that he didn’t have a president like this back in the day.

Catesby is so done with these stupid humans.

NOTES

Between the transcendent promises made for what artificial intelligence will be able to do in a few short years and the reality of what will actually happen is a canyon of Grand proportions. Sam Altman recently said that not even CEOs’ jobs will be safe from the coming superintelligent AI:

“AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me,” Altman admitted. He added that that reality is not far off. “On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”

Given what I know about Altman, I’d venture that the current versions of AI would do a better job as CEO than him, and we all might be the better for it. But one way or another, it’s sadly safe to say that LLMs will have a deleterious effect on both education and the state of the work force, and I can say that with all confidence because we’re already seeing it happen. Many such examples are comically catastrophic, such as the recent federal court case in Kansas where a judge brought the hammer down on a law firm for submitting AI-generated briefs “including nonexistent quotations and citations and misrepresented information.” But there are innumerable, less spectacular instances of entry-level jobs that would typically be filled by people newly on the market—data-entry, copywriting, basic coding, junior roles in finance and information service, research, and so on—being done by AI. The fact that these jobs are often being done badly by AI, riddled with inconsistency and the sort of hallucinations that incited the ire of the Kansas judge,1 might be hand-waved away as the mere growing pains of a paradigm shift. As AI grows ever more sophisticated, such problems will disappear.

Perhaps. But that is not my concern. Or rather, it’s part of a broader concern: it may be that generative AI becomes sophisticated enough to flawlessly do all these jobs, but even if it plateaus in its current iterations, we’re still looking at a profound hollowing-out of a job market in which “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predict[s] that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated.”

A lot of the argument surrounding this prospect has to do with the kidney-punch to coming generations’ job prospects and an egregious spike in unemployment. Utopians among the AI apologists, Altman included, airily predict an AI-based economy of abundance that will allow people to follow their passions supported by universal basic income. Harder-nosed prognosticators say, essentially, suck it up buttercup, we don’t mourn for a horse-and-buggy economy displaced by automobiles. The massive job loss is, however, basically baked in. As bad as that is, it’s also not my concern here.

Because what we stand to lose isn’t merely economic. My own experience of AI has been in the classroom, and that has made it clear to me that when AI eliminates entry-level jobs, it’s not just killing jobs—it’s hollowing out future expertise, knowledge, and experience.

1. It’s the Process, Stupid

One of my major projects for my current half-sabbatical is rethinking how to structure assignments to AI-proof my classes. On one hand, this isn’t an entirely negative thing: being forced to rethink one’s assumptions and practices is useful, energizing, and (hopefully) rejuvenating.

Fingers crossed. But it also means that our best pedagogical and evaluative tool is no longer available. For one thing is clear: the basic essay, long the sine qua non of humanities classes, is effectively dead to us. Or, it is dead as an assignment students do on the own recognizance; the lure of generative AI and the impossibility of definitively identifying it is too great. I will still be pursuing the writing of essays with in-class assignments, most especially with my first-year class—for all that proscriptive essay-writing is an imperfect tool, it has comprised a happy medium between more creative evaluative exercises and the time and labour constraints imposed by class size and course load.

A brief discussion of why this is the case is, hopefully, illustrative of my larger point.

I say that essays are an imperfect pedagogical tool in part because they can become overly proscriptive. On the other hand, that can be one of their benefits, as it gives students a framework within which they can work out their thoughts. Such indeed is the five-paragraph “keyhole” essay taught ubiquitously in high school.

This is one of the first things I dispense with in my first-year classes, and I have lost track of how many students have approached me worried that the 2000- or 2500-word essays they write in my second-year classes will make their five paragraphs too long. It’s not that the keyhole essay is a bad way to learn to write argumentatively; it’s just that it’s no longer sufficient in university. Which isn’t to say I discard the model entirely—I retain the need to end the opening paragraph with a specific thesis statement, among other proscriptive elements I impose, such as the proper method of introducing, incorporating, and explicating quotations; the need to be specific to the text(s) in question; and how to analyze rather than summarize. I am most rigid in essay requirements in first and second year, becoming looser and allowing for more creativity in more senior classes.

One intrinsic value of an argumentative essay is twofold: one, as noted above, it gives students a helpful framework. More talented students by turns thrive with essays, or else bump against their constraints. Both are useful experiences. Students still developing their writing skills, conversely, have a rubric that does part of the work for them. Secondly, the format makes evaluation easier for me. It’s been a long time since I first realized I could predict what the grade would be from the opening paragraph; that rubric that helps the students is also a useful framework for me, as I have clear criteria for what constitutes A, B, C, and D essays,2 criteria I make clear to my students.

The greater intrinsic value of the argumentative essay is the process of writing it. Grades, I tell my students, are just a way of keeping score in a game they’re playing against themselves. What matters is doing the work—doing the reading, thinking about it, researching, thinking more, writing notes, writing drafts, tearing your hair out, writing more, rewriting. The finished product is mostly incidental to the true salutary benefit of the process; the principal value of a completed essay, aside from demonstrating to your professor that you’ve done the work and satisfied the assignment, is to have a benchmark for the next part of this iterative process—the next essay, the next course, the next degree.

Undergraduate essays, I tell my students, are the academic equivalent of stickhandling the puck around pylons, or shooting endless free throws, or banging a tennis ball off a wall, or … well, choose your metaphor. I reach for the sports analogy in part because I have yet to meet someone who thinks you can get good at your sport of choice without endless practice. Without doing the work. Yes, there are people who have a natural talent and instinct for hockey or soccer or whatever, but nobody gets really good without instruction and coaching and practice, practice, practice.

This is why my go-to analogy for using AI to write your papers is that it’s like giving your fitness tracker to somebody and getting them to exercise for you. If your only goal is to post great numbers to social media, it’s as good a way as any to cheat. But even as you boast about the marathon you just ran—see, look at the map of my route!—you’re still getting winded climbing the stairs.

2. The Great Hollowing Out

It’s AI’s subversion—or really, erasure—of process that makes me most fearful for what the future holds. Social media in general, especially as it has become increasingly algorithmic, has been profoundly deleterious to students’ attention span, ability to focus, and capacity to engage with dense or complex material.3 AI ratchets these tendencies up by a magnitude, while also giving students a means by which to bypass the process of learning. Writing anything from scratch is a laborious and often tedious process, especially when what you’re writing is an essay for a class you don’t really like or whose material fails to pique your interest.

But here’s the thing: the most half-assed, last-minute, pulled-out-of-your-butt essay you finish at 3am the night before it’s due, possibly for a class you hate on a topic you care nothing about for a professor who bores you to death? There is greater educational benefit in writing that essay that garners you a C- than something you generate with ChatGPT in ten minutes, nine minutes and fifty-five seconds of which is you cutting, pasting, and formatting. At least the C- required some thought and the crafting of sentences, probably with a lot of creative cursing along the way. If the only thing you learned was more specifically why you hate this class and this topic, that’s still infinitely more than you get from a chatbot.

(I suppose that, as a professor, I should caveat that the 3am coffee-fuelled essay isn’t exactly best practice. But I would be lying if I said I’d never written such an essay, or that I didn’t consider it something of a rite of passage.)

What AI thus threatens is a hollowing-out process; whatever curricular restructuring I do in the new school year will be in an effort of fighting that particular tide. I can only hope that high school curricula will also be employing AI-proofing strategies, or else the battle will always be lost as more and more students coming up will not only be AI users but will consider it their basic right. At the other end of things, however, is the post-graduation world I was discussing in my introduction, in which AI obviates a critical mass of entry-level white-collar jobs.

The problem, as I see it, remains the issue of process. In a nutshell: if you’re eliminating all those entry-level positions, how precisely do you plan to promote people to senior, managerial and executive positions?

Take law, for example. There has been much musing about how AI will affect the legal profession, as the sort of grunt-work of researching, writing, and filing briefs seems perfectly suited for LLMs—it’s laborious, tedious, and time-consuming. It’s standard practice for law firms to hire small armies of recent graduates, who work long hours toiling away at such documents, all while earning entry-level salaries. Doesn’t it make far more sense, from both a financial and time-management perspective, to hand off that work to AI? It goes without saying, what’s produced will have to be carefully vetted to avoid such embarrassments as the one I cited at the start of this essay, but really, that firm’s sin was laziness.

Of course, being able to catch the mistakes made by a hallucinating bot requires the sort of knowledge and experience one develops in the process of going from being a junior lawyer to a senior lawyer. Part of the entire point of entry-level grunt work is to learn how to do it. New cooks chop vegetables for weeks and months before being allowed near an actual station in the kitchen; apprentices sweep the shop and carry things and hand tools to the professionals before ever being given the most basic of tasks. A generation after AI makes its conquest of entry-level jobs, who will be left to ascend to the higher ranks? Or, as Sam Altman seems to suggest, will it just be AI doing all the jobs?4

Leaving aside the utopian flights of fancy Altman et al promise and assuming that AI will continue on a more realistically shallow trajectory, I think it’s safe to assume that some form of entry-level job flight will occur. Which almost certainly means that a generation or so down the road, if not much sooner, a critical mass of white-collar and information-based industry is going to face an expertise and experience crunch.

In my more optimistic moments I find it reasonable to think this might happen sooner rather than later: already we’ve started to see a growing backlash against the tech industry and AI in particular. I’m often heartened when speaking to students who share my antipathy to AI. But these examples tend to be more isolated incidents compared to the trillion-dollar juggernaut of the industry and the pervasiveness of its products, already now indelibly insinuated into almost all aspects of life.

Hopefully there will be appetite, and the money that follows, for strategic opting-out.

3. The Air-Gapped University

I like to think that if I were a senior partner at a major law firm, I would make it a selling point to our clients that we would never use AI. There would be a zero-tolerance policy within the firm, and we would be committed to hiring the best law school graduates—which, given our competitors’ use of AI, would mean we’d have the pick of the litter.

I have to imagine that, going forward, such promises and pledges will become more common: that the more the backlash to AI builds, and the more its deficiencies make their presence known, the more call there will be for human-only production and creation across industries.

Or perhaps not. I’m a terrible prognosticator at the best of times, and a good enough student of history to know we only really recognize the milestones and tipping points when they’re in the rearview mirror. It might be we’re at an inflection point with Silicon Valley and the broligarchy such as we we reached with tobacco companies thirty years ago; it might be things only escalate from here. Either way, I remain steadfast in my conviction, as I’ve expressed previously, that at least part of our salvation lies in the reinvigoration of the humanities and the recuperation, culturally, of a sense of its importance.

Which brings us back to the question of the university, and education more broadly. We face the hollowing-out crisis as much as anyone, both from the threat of AI and from the continual budget cuts levied on us year over year. All of this is compounded by the fact that change within university culture and curricula is glacial, which has always been at least partly by design. Unfortunately, that means we’re ill-equipped to adapt to rapidly changing technological norms. This has not, for the most part, been an issue until recently—if you’re teaching art history or philosophy 101, it doesn’t substantively matter whether the students’ essays are handwritten, typewritten, or composed on a computer; nor does it matter much if they’re handed in in hard copy, emailed, or uploaded to a course shell. What matters is when the composition of those essays can be outsourced to sophisticated predictive text.

I’d like to believe there will be a renewed demand for a humanities education, or at least those things it provides: facility with critical reading and writing, deep immersion in what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said,” the development of an historical and ethical imagination; not a retrograde turn to an uncritical celebration of “Western civilization,” but a humanities with a global sensibility. In my fonder daydream, I find myself imagining a reduced but rededicated university that has been refigured along vaguely monastic lines. It is entirely offline: no internet, no phones, and absolutely no generative AI. All computers are air-gapped,5 and ideally only used for the final composition of assignments; all other writing activities, from notetaking to first drafts, are done by hand with pen and paper. Classes are either small seminars emphasizing critical engagement and interpersonal argument, or large lectures in which professors bring their expertise to bear in guiding students through the broad strokes of subjects.

As I said: a bit of a daydream. I have no idea how the logistics would work, but I can easily imagine this sort of thing attracting a small but fervent cohort of students. In the meantime, I return to planning for autumn’s classes (still five months hence, mercifully) and thinking up ways to inspire my students to have similar academic daydreams.

I leave you today with Gloucester the Cat, proudly showing off his new purple scarf.

NOTES